With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.

As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

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

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?

Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed.

He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.