I was still unable to reconcile the uncontrollable passions of “want” and the unmovable insistence of “need” as they battled relentlessly over possession of my meager resources, with “want” winning out over “need” far more frequently than it should have.

No one knows all that there is to know. (This despite Mark Twain’s observation that between him and Albert Einstein, they encompassed all human knowledge. As he put it, “Einstein knows all that there is to know, and I know the rest.”) The task is to learn as much as you can about as much as you can; the great disease of mankind is ignorance.

We had our chances. While the early wars were often fought between tribes or nations who knew nothing of each other and feared each other’s strange looks, customs, and unknown powers, much of that changed over time. In the wars of my time, while people spoke different languages, nations were no longer fighting total strangers. We knew, at least, the overwhelming similarities of the various members of the human family. Beyond our mutual need for food, water, and air, we knew that even among our enemies there were similarities of love, kindness, religious worship, and reverence for children as inheritors of our space on earth.