Maxims

by William H. Benson

September 22, 2016

     In James Michener’s book, The Source, he created a fictional character who made a pest of himself among both friends and enemies by walking around ancient Israel and repeating a series of shop-worn proverbs that he had stockpiled over the years. For example, when he would meet a person with a problem, he would quote a more or less fitting proverb. Not everyone appreciated his tactic.

     The truth is: for eons men and women have loved their proverbs. Even today, most authors will include a catchy saying at their books’ beginning, often a quote from someone well-known, in the hope that the quote will capture the book’s essence.

     The thesaurus lists a number of synonyms for the proverb: adage, aphorism, axiom maxim, dictum, saying, motto, byword, principle, law, conclusion, rule, epigram, slogan, bromide, cliché, platitude, saw, or chestnut. Although there are distinctions of difference, they all mean the same thing.

     The most quoted English writer is, of course, William Shakespeare: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” “All the world’s a stage,” “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” and “two-star crossed lovers.” The Irish writer, Frank McCourt, said that when first exposed to Shakespeare, when a mere boy, sick in the hospital, he said that the playwright’s words, “were like jewels in his mouth.”

     Benjamin Franklin achieved fame and fortune in colonial Pennsylvania with “Poor Richard’s Almanac.” In each issue he included a list of axioms: “Fish and visitors stink in three days;” “Lost time is never found again;” “Speak little, do much;” and “Clean your finger before you point at my spot.” Throughout the colonies people read Franklin’s succinct words and appreciated his wit and wisdom.

     The most quoted American writer is, of course, Mark Twain. His definition of a classic: “One of those books that everybody says we should read, but nobody does.” “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” “Get your facts first. Then, you can distort them as you please.” 

     In Mark Twain’s fictional story, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer’s Sunday School teacher insisted that he memorize Bible verses, and if he did, he would receive a yellow or red or blue ticket. He failed to memorize even a single verse, but through shrewd negotiations, he exchanged his marbles and “a piece of lickrish and a fish hook,” for the other boys’ tickets.

     He ended with “nine yellow tickets, nine red tickets, and ten blue ones,” proof that he had memorized two thousand verses, but when the Sunday School superintendent asked him to repeat a verse about the disciples, he answered, “David and Goliath.”

     One quote falsely attributed to Mark Twain is the following. “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant, that I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man’s intelligence had improved in seven years.” He could not have said that because Samuel Clemens’s father died when the lad was only eleven years old.

     Another of Twain’s quotes he did say, but then a reporter transformed it into a humorous retort, even though Twain did not intend that meaning. He is purported to have said, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

     The truth is that a London reporter heard that someone with the last name Clemens was gravely ill, living in London, and may have died. The reporter quizzed Mark Twain about his health. Twain jotted a note to the reporter, and explained that it was his cousin James Ross Clemens, who “was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

     These examples of Twain’s demonstrate two difficulties associated with the proverb: that someone could not have said it, or that its meaning was converted into something the author never intended.

     Another difficulty is that the saying serves as a blanket that covers all times, circumstances, and people; or that it may hide a hidden agenda. For example, if someone says, “If you are not growing, you are dying.” This, I say, is manipulation. The speaker wants you to adopt their plan, their idea, and to jump on their bandwagon, when a better option may be “not growing.” “Fool rush in where angels fear to tread,” wrote Alexander Pope.

     Woodrow Wilson said that World War I, was “the war to end all wars,” and that America was going to war “to make the world safe for democracy.” Neither bromide proved true. The Great War in Europe exceeded all other wars in terms of death and destruction and was a prelude to World War II.

     Donald Trump wants to “make America great again.” As far as I know and can see, America has never ceased even one day being great. A quickly coined phrase may or may not be true. Judge its merit, consider its source, and balance its import with your own past experiences. Think it through.

     I end with two favorite quotes. The author of the first is unknown. “The bitterness of poor quality is long remembered after the sweetness of low price has been forgotten.” Then, Groucho Marx said, “I refuse to belong to a club, association, fraternal organization, church, or synagogue that would be so foolish as to have me for a member.”

Immigration

by William H. Benson

September 8, 2016

     Japan has a sizable population but a small land mass. About 127 million people live on just 377,930 km². Among the world’s countries, its population ranks 11^th, but its geographical area ranks 61^st.

     Canada is the reverse. It has a small population, but a large land mass. Just 36.5 million people live on nearly 10 million km². Its population ranks 38^th, but its geographical area ranks second, just behind Russia’s colossal 17 million km². Canada could absorb a much larger population.

     For decades, and even centuries, Japan has discouraged immigration, and today “the people pride themselves on their homogeneity.” One writer said that the Japanese people have “reflexively blamed foreigners for all social ills,” and that “discrimination is still rife.” In a derogatory tone, they label foreigners as “gaijin,” meaning an “outside person.”

     The Japanese fear an invasion of foreigners. They do not want terrorists. They do not want to see burkinis on their beaches. They want Japan for the Japanese. One writer, Tatsuya Mizuno, said that even “Brazilians of Japanese origin, who were encouraged to migrate to Japan in the 1980’s, have never really been accepted, despite their Japanese ethnicity.”

     The need for immigration into Japan though is paramount. Today, Japan’s companies have trouble hiring sufficient numbers of skilled workers. A substantial number of working-age people are set to retire in the next few decades, and a writer for The Economist magazine predicted that Japan’s population will shrink to less than 100 million people by the year 2060.

     Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, recognizes the worsening demographics but has hesitated to throw open his countries’ doors. His government though “has quietly eased Japan’s near-ban on visas for low-skilled workers.” In Tokyo now, visitors can see people from Korea, China, India, Vietnam, and Thailand, but, “Only tiny numbers of foreigners ever become Japanese citizens.”

     The opposite has happened in Canada. Forty-five years ago, on October 8, 1971, Canada’s prime minister then, Pierre Trudeau, and the father of the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, introduced legislation that threw out the old race-based immigration rules, and introduced a color-blind policy that instead emphasized language, experience, and education. He opened Canada’s doors, and no prime minister since has dared to shut them.

     As a result, Canada is now the one of the most multi-cultural countries in the world. Each year Canada welcomes about 250,000 people. In June 2000, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien said, “Canada has become a post-national, multicultural society. It contains the globe within its borders. . . . Canadians are, by virtue of history and necessity, open to the world.” On immigration, Canada has triumphed.

     A Canadian journalist, Jonathan Tepperman, recently said on a TED talk that “Canada has four times France’s immigration rate, and that in 2015, Canada took in ten times the number of Syrian refugees that the United States did.”

     On Wednesday, August 31, the Republican contender for the Oval Office, Donald Trump, flew—not north to Canada—but south to Mexico. There he met Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, who declared to Trump that “Mexican nationals in the United States are honest people, good people. Mexicans deserve respect.” As for who pays for the wall, Trump said, “we didn’t discuss that.”

     If he had dared to look outside, he would have seen a Mexican citizen, a lady, holding up a sign that read, “¡Fuera! ¡Fuera! Donald Trump Racista. Xenofobo. Anitmexicano.”

     To appeal to voters, Trump has softened his hardline campaign promise on the deportation of the 11.5 million undocumented workers in the United States. Most citizens are “appalled by the prospect of ‘federal agents breaking up families’ and shipping millions of people across the border.”

     Yet, Trump’s newest campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, summarized Trump’s current policy, “No amnesty. No legalization. No sanctuary cities. The people who have committed a crime are gone.” A reporter at The Baltimore Sun summed up Trump’s wavering, “Rarely has a presidential candidate flip-flopped on an issue as throughly as Trump has done on illegal immigration.”

     One wonders which country approaches immigration right? A closed Japan, an open Canada, an open United States that now threatens to deport its illegals, or a country like Mexico, or even Syria, that has exported millions of its own citizens? The answer depends first upon geography: whether the land mass offers a temperate climate, sufficient rainfall, fertile soil, and adequate minerals, timber, flora, and fauna. It also depends upon the population’s size, skills, work habits, and education.

     Governing officials seek to balance their country’s geography with its population. What is right for one country may not work for another. Still, ambitious and energetic people will by instinct migrate to the country that offers them the best opportunity, and for the last four centuries that has been the United States. Warren Buffet says, “The babies being born in America today are the luckiest crop in history.”       

Great Plains Wildlife

by William H. Benson

August 25, 2016

     Vacation this summer took me to southeast Alaska, where I met the zoologist Brent Nixon. Each of his high-energy hour-long lectures on Alaska’s wildlife packed the theater and thrilled his audiences. Those who attended learned a host of details on the Great Humpback whales, the North American black and brown bears, seals, sea lions, Orca or the killer whales, and coastal bald eagles.

     His lectures prompted me to think about our wildlife here on the Great Plains, in the center of North America, how it pales in comparison to Alaska’s, and how it has changed.

     As little as two hundred years ago, enormous herds of the American Bison or buffalo roamed across the plains, and lesser numbers of elk and wolves. Then, late in the nineteenth century, large numbers of people came here to farm, raise livestock, and build homes and towns, and they converted the plains into a slaughterhouse. As a result, today on the plains, the few buffalo remaining are relegated to ranches, penned in by barbed wire, but the elk and the wolves have disappeared.

     Further back in time, into the last Ice Age, between 70,000 and 10,000 years ago, large mammals lived here on the Great Plains, including saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, mastodons, mammoths, and giant bears. Scholars are unsure what factors brought about their extinction, but they too have disappeared.

     What is left today? When we drive between towns, most likely we will see Pronghorn antelopes, deer, prairie dogs, coyotes, hawks, or eagles. If we get out of our car or pickup, we may catch sight of a fox, a cottontail rabbit, a jack rabbit, a pheasant, a badger, a raccoon, or a snake.

     Through licenses and designated seasons, state and federal officials limit the hunting and fishing of certain species, but for others, especially coyotes, prairie dogs, and rattle snakes, it is open season, meaning no limits and by any means.

     Dan Flores, a historian, who now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, published this year a book he entitled, Coyote America. In it, he calls the effort to eradicate the coyote [aka prairie wolf] “the most epic campaign of persecution against any animal in North American history.” He writes, that they are “victims of a crusade that surpassed any other in terms of the range of killing techniques and cruelty.”

     In 1931, Congress approved a spending bill that appropriated $10 million for the purchase of strychnine, and blanket poisoning killed off millions. Flores says that “between 1947 and 1956, approximately 6.5 million coyotes were exterminated in the American West.” And the killing has not stopped. He estimates that “500,000 are killed every year.”

     And yet, despite the strychnine, the steel traps, and the guns, the coyote has flourished. Unlike the buffalo, the elk, and the wolf, the coyote has increased its numbers and its range. For eons, coyotes were creatures who inhabited the plains and deserts, but in recent decades they have crossed the Mississippi River and taken up residence in the midwestern states, along the Atlantic seaboard, and even in cities. They arrived in Denver in the 1970s, and in New York City’s Central Park in 1999.

     Coyotes now live all across North America. Flores writes, “by the late 1970s, they had colonized all of North America—they even swam cold Atlantic waters to Cape Cod. Unless they stowaway to Hawaii, they colonized their final U. S. state, Delaware, in 2010.”

    How did the coyote survive a scorched-earth campaign? Flores points to their “reliance on problem-solving intelligence for success,” their excellent sense of smell and sight, their nocturnal behavior, their ability to deliver large litters of pups, and their willingness to seek new territory and to eat anything.

     Flores also underscored the coyotes’ social adaptive skill-set, which he labeled “fusion-fission.” Like wolves, coyotes will join together into packs, but unlike wolves, the coyote will separate from the pack and live alone. The “lone wolf” does not exist, but the “lone coyote” does.

     Coyotes will eat prairie dogs, a good thing. Although prairie dogs belong to the squirrel family, they choose to burrow into the ground and build tunnels. It is the excess dirt that they kick out of the tunnel at the surface that causes a pasture’s immense damage. Ranchers stare in disgust at the destroyed grass, and the devastated pasture. Hunters shoot them, ranchers poison them, but the prairie dogs still flourish.

     It has been said that “the female prairie dog is born pregnant.” That is not quite true. A full year passes before they reach sexual maturity, and they produce only a single litter each year.  

     For decades people have labelled the prairie dogs and the prairie wolves the Great Plains’s worst predators. One has to admire their tenacity to live and thrive despite an oppressive, determined, and intelligent enemy who hates them just for existing, for what they are.

     Flores predicted, “When the world ends, only cockroaches, rats, and coyotes will remain.” To that short list I would add five more: ants, bacteria, flies, mosquitoes, and prairie dogs.

Watts Riots

by William H. Benson

August 11, 2016

     Daniel Moynihan sbumitted his report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in March of 1965, and five months later, on August 11, 1965, the Watts riots broke out. In 1965, Moynihan was a young assistant secretary of Labor working in the Johnson administration. Eleven years later, in 1976, he would win the election to the Senate from the state of New York and serve as the distinguished Senator there for three terms.

     Like many Americans of Irish heritage, Moynihan spoke his mind, and it showed in his report. He warned the nation of the rising illegitimacy rates, and the “tangle of pathology” that threatened the stability of African-American families. He said,

     “But there is one truly great discontinuity in family structure in the United States at the present time; that is between the white world in general and that of the Negro American. The white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability.

     “By contrast, the family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable, and in many urban centers is approaching a complete breakdown. Nearly a quarter of Negro women living in cities, who have ever married, are divorced, separated, or are living apart from their husbands.”

    Today urban scholars look back at the Moynihan report and say that Daniel “cast a black crisis as one of national import[ance] that demanded a national response.” And yet, the national response was far less than overwhelming.

     On August 11, 1965, a Los Angeles policeman named Lee Minikus pulled over a 21-year-old black man named Marquette Frye for drunk driving near the corner of Avalon Boulevard and 116^th Street, just north of the U. S. Highway 105 in Watts, a dozen miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Frye’s mother came to the scene of the arrest, and she assaulted Officer Minikus.

     A crowd gathered, and people began throwing rocks. The altercation escalated into a riot. For the next six days the LAPD, the California Highway Patrol, and the National Guard worked to restore order, as some 30,000 people rioted, looted buildings, and burnt properties. In its wake, thirty-four people lay dead, 1032 were injured, and 3438 were arrested.

     Sergeant Ben Dunn said, “The streets of Watts resembled an all-out war zone in some far-off foreign country. It bore no resemblance to the United States of America.”

     Commentators later pinned the blame for the riot’s fierce intensity upon inadequate housing. For decades, the African-American people of Los Angeles endured the most blatant form of racial discrimination. They could not purchase or rent a home outside their segregated area, because realtors and landlords would block the sale or the lease. The people felt stuck, excluded from the suburbs, and restricted to the Watts and Compton areas, a dozen miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

     In 1963, California’s Congress recognized the problem and passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act in order to end residential segregation based upon racial discrimination, but then the following year, California’s voters put on the ballot Proposition 14, an amendment to California’s constitution that repealed the Rumford Fair Housing Act and legalized discrimination.

     The African-American people were outraged. The black activist, Bayard Rustin, published his Watts Manifesto in March of 1966, and said, “The whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.”

     One young black man who called Watts his home was Stan Sanders. He had graduated from Jordan High School, less than two miles from where Marquette Frye was arrested. He received a scholarship to attend Whittier College, won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, and was enrolled at Yale Law School when Watts exploded. He had refused to “quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.”

     Tom Brokaw first met Stan Sanders in the summer of 1966. In 2007, Brokaw published his book, Boom! Voices of the Sixties, and in it he asked Sanders about his memories of the Watts riots.

     “I blame the way we reacted to the Watts riots,” Sanders said. “If low educational levels were a primary cause of poverty, why didn’t we pour in massive amounts of educational aid? When I went there, Jordan High was a decent school. I visited recently, and now it’s just a joke. There’s no real teaching. Kids can’t read. We kind of gave up.”

     Brokaw commented, “The combination of the dissolution of the black family structure in too many neighborhoods, the loss of parental involvement in the education of too many black children, and the indifference of the majority community adds up to warehousing, not educating.”

     Two final points: Proposition 14 remained in effect until voters repealed it in 1974, and Daniel Moynihan’s father, John Henry Moynihan, deserted the family when Daniel was ten years old. He knew firsthand the devastating consequences of an unstable home life. 

Terror

by William H. Benson

July 28, 2016

     The Scottish writer and thinker Thomas Carlyle planned to write a massive three-volume history of the French Revolution. He drafted the first volume and then asked his friend John Stuart Mill to review it. Mill’s housekeeper mistook Carlyle’s pages for trash and pitched them into the fire. About that housekeeper, one can say, “She, or he, cleaned too well.”

     One can imagine the ugly emotions that surged within Carlyle felt after Mill told him that his draft was gone, destroyed, burnt up: horror, disappointment, outrage, panic, even terror. The unthinkable had happened. Carlyle though was made of sterner stuff. He shelved those emotions long enough to write his second and third volumes first before he tackled, for a second time, his destroyed first volume.

     Once completed, in 1837, Thomas Carlyle published The French Revolution, and in it he sketched scenes of people caught up in the revolution’s unfolding and unpredictable events. One reviewer said that Carlyle “paints a grim description of the complete and utter chaos of the time.”

     His readers feel the same exhilaration that the French people felt when people stormed the Bastille, the royal fortress and prison in Paris, on July 14, 1789. Here, they believed, was a chance for a new political order. Carlyle then describes the “daze and trance that the Terror’s victims felt,” as one by one they were led to the guillotine, including the king, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette, in 1793, as well as the Great Terror’s architect, Robespierre, the following year.

     Terror comes in at least two forms: by human design, and by nature.

     At 5:41 p.m., on Sunday afternoon on May 22, 2011, a tornado touched down on Joplin, Missouri’s  west edge and then marched east for six miles, cutting a swath of havoc and destruction through the heart of the city. The tornado’s horrific winds approached speeds of up to 200 miles per hour, and that Sunday afternoon 160 people died.

     Working at a Fastrip gas station and convenience store that day was Ruben Carter, a recent college graduate. As the storm worsened, Ruben took command and ordered all those inside the store to assemble in the beer cooler. “Women and children first,” he shouted above the storm’s roar.

     A reporter said, “Some of the people in the cooler are screaming, and some are crying, and some are completely quiet. And then the tornado, and not just the storm preceding it, crests the hill, and hits them with its full force. It is a terrible sound. As Ruben pulls the cooler’s door shut, he sees the entire front of his store, now that it’s been unmoored, suddenly shoot skyward, like a rocket.”

     The tornado destroyed the gas station that day, leaving in its wake a pile of jagged rubble, but twenty-three people crawled out of that beer cooler and stared in amazement at the destruction outside. They were the lucky ones. They survived. Others elsewhere in Joplin had also hid in coolers, but Carter said, “it had not worked out so well for them.”

     Terror. It hits people hard. A pounding in the chest. A shortness of breath. A realization dawns that this too “may not work out so well for us.”

     In the 1940’s, the Nazi’s marched millions toward the gas chambers, the most outrageous and appalling fact of human conduct in recorded history. On 9-11, thousands inside the twin towers, the Pentagon, and on the four aircraft felt sheer and absolute terror, in an instant. Did any of those victims dare to believe that it would work out well for them?

     Today, news and terror are linked arm-in-arm. To read the news is to read terror, whether in America or in Europe or in the Middle East. In the United States, another school shooting causes consternation and bewilderment. On our city’s streets, we hear and see policemen brawling with young men, and their battles, like the wild west, end in gun shots that kill and wound each other.

     In Europe, the citizens of Paris, Brussels, Nice, and now Munich, just this last week, have felt the emotional impact of a terrorist’s rampage. Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a truck into a crowd at Nice, France, on July 14, Bastille Day, France’s national holiday, while people watched the fireworks. His handiwork ended 84 innocent people’s lives. 

    And after the storm passes, and after the rampage ends, then what? Well then, at that point peace breaks out. The sun shines. Normal life returns. The living bury the dead and rebuild their homes. They write a second time their destroyed manuscripts. Human beings possess this astonishing capacity to rebuild that which others or nature have destroyed.

     A historian once asked, “What are the long-term consequences of the French Revolution?” Another historian provided a flippant answer, “It is too soon to tell.” Today we ask ourselves, “What are the long-term consequences of these series of violent and random terrorist rampages?” We answer, “It is way too soon to tell.”

A Foolish Consistency

by William H. Benson

July 14, 2016

     Last week, I happened to hear Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast on two former NBA players, Wilt Chamberlain and Rick Barry. Gladwell, the author of the best-sellers—The Tipping Point and Outliers—noticed that Wilt Chamberlain holds the record for the most free-throws made in a single game, 28 out of 32, on March 2, 1962, the night he made 100 points, another NBA record. Yet, over his entire career, Wilt the Stilt only made 51.1% of his free-throws.

     Gladwell wondered about that anomaly. What did Wilt Chamberlain do different that one night? The answer: he shot his 32 free-throws underhand, holding the ball with both hands, but down low, between his knees, “a granny style,” instead of overhand, the standard free-throw shot. For a time then, Wilt shot underhand, but then later he reverted back to the overhand shot, and his percentage dropped.

     Why did he stop? Wilt explained, “I felt like a sissy.”

     Gladwell insists that the underhand shot is the more accurate method, and yet few, if any, college or NBA basketball players shoot that way, and their percentage-of-shots-made stands at about 70%.

     Rick Barry played professional basketball for fourteen seasons, won the national title in 1975 playing for the Golden State warriors, and he shot most all of his free-throws underhand. “At the time of his retirement in 1980, his .900 free throw percentage ranked first in NBA history.”

     When Rick was young, his dad encouraged him to shoot underhanded, but Rick complained, “Dad, that’s a sissy shot.” His father replied, “Son, they can’t make fun of you if you’re making your shots.” Rick was convinced, and from then on he did not care what other players or fans said about his style.

     Gladwell said that Rick is a guy who does not bow to peer pressure, to the current wisdom, and who “is not looking around the room, checking the temperature, before saying or doing anything.”

     Gladwell provides other examples of commonly-accepted ideas that if challenged, may prove false.

     He wonders why most football teams punt on fourth down rather than run or pass the ball. He is convinced that if teams would fire their punter, they would “win one or two more games each season.” Perhaps, he is correct, but others say it depends upon the team’s offensive strength, as well as the opposing team’s defensive strength.

     Gladwell also suggests that NFL teams should avoid the first round draft picks because of their extreme price and their record of disappointment. General managers will find the future stars, Gladwell says, in the later rounds. For example, the New England Patriots picked Tom Brady in the seventh round, the 199^th pick, of the 2000 draft.

     Who among us dares to question and test every idea in the market place of ideas? Gladwell talks about a person’s “threshold,” that moment when she or he lays aside all fear of rejection, all taunts and laughter, all peer pressure, and says or does something another way.

     Historians know that the conventional wisdom has not always proven itself correct, but that it changes, as the generations change. It is the historian who identifies and measures that change.

     In the United States, slavery was once an accepted practice, written into the texts of state and national constitutions. It took the fierce intensity of an abolitionist like William Lloyd Douglas, the political skill of Abraham Lincoln, and a bloody civil war to stomp out that miserable institution.

     Although conditions have improved, human beings all over the world still today must confront racism, segregation, gender discrimination, sexism, exploitation, and tyranny. It is the duty of a courageous man or a woman to challenge those mind-numbing attitudes that smother human creativity.

    Early in the twentieth century, most people were unaware of the health consequences of prolonged tobacco use. “The U.S. Army included cigarettes in soldiers’ rations until 1975.” The conventional thought for decades, that tobacco use was harmless, was proved wrong.

     Human beings kill animals, both the domesticated and wild types. Farmers kill rattlesnakes and prairie dogs. Trappers trap coyotes. For centuries hunters shot and killed this continent’s immense buffalo herds, almost to extinction, but they did drive to extinction the passenger pigeon.

     One person who disagreed with the wanton slaughter of this planet’s rich animal life was Albert Schweitzer. His compassion extended to all life forms, down to the pesky insects; he refused to kill any life form, anything with a will-to-live, after he moved to Africa. He called his philosophy, “a Reverence for Life.” He believed all life forms sacred, and his fundamental principle of morality: “It is good to maintain and cherish life; it is evil to destroy and check life.”

There are always other ways to act. Circumstances change, new technologies and products arrive at the market place, and life-enhancing opinions force themselves forward for others to notice. It takes courage to try something different. Some like Rick Barry embrace the notion. Others, like Wilt Chamberlain, try it for a while, feel ashamed, and quit. Most though refuse to try.