A single, ordinary person still can make a difference - and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

The world is filled with human toxins -- not the darkness that we all occasionally crave, but actually people who are so unwilling to bask in the angelic light that is offered us all that they grow poisonous -- and you can pray for their eventual recovery and healing. And sometimes those prayers will be answered. But sometimes these individuals have been vaccinated against goodness and against angels and they are so unwilling to give an inch to their God that often they never (and I use this expression absolutely literally) see the light.

And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.