Where two or more are gathered: politics. Where two or more are gathered kindly: artfulness.

Beauty prepares the heart for justice. And beautiful decisions add up to a beautiful city. Beautiful cities don’t just happen, we might say. It’s a granular process in which people behave beautifully together with others and it all adds up.

An alternative to war emerges when we see all the enemies – weeds, criminals, terrorists, calories, selfishness, laziness and so forth – not as causes of evil, but as symptoms of a deeper condition. Focusing on the symptoms, warring on the symptoms, allows the deeper causes to go unexamined and unchanged.