It is increasingly clear to me that the seeds of the future have been planted by differing breeds of humans.  As scientists are trying to find the genome that distinguishes us from Neanderthal man – we know we are cousins to chimpanzees – we have not been able to tell the bomb makers from the educators.

It is sadly true that you can educate people to hate and to go to war when all they really want is to be peaceful and trade with their neighbors.  It is also true when you whip up their anger and depict their neighbors as devil workers and handmaidens of Satan, education to build and spread ideas of equality and democracy are ground into the dust.  There are competing religions, ideologies, and thirst for the oil that remains underground while there is understanding common to all that choices made today will have consequences down through the generations to come.

Remember the wisdom that if you give a man a fish he will have food for today but if you teach him HOW to fish he will become self-sufficient?  This is so patently true that it should shame those in the world who give men a gun and bombs and expect continuity of civilization.  Sadly, give him endless support by neighbors who do not die as a result of the fires of war they help ignite and we have endless strife and death and destruction.  The U.S. today is supporting the other democracy in the midst of the dominant Islamic culture and giving it the means of destroying a joint enemy.  Hezbollah and Hamas as well as their supporters in Syria and Iran in addition to the Saudis and other Islamic nations believe that Americans who are not Jews are as Satanic as the Jews their primary enemy because of despoliation of their holy places in the Holy Land (a propagandist claim that has no basis in fact).

Turn this around and look at it in a different light, if you can.  Give a man a piece of land where it is easy to plant a seed and harvest a crop. Give another man a desert and he finds the genius to make it bloom.  There is an education in both instances but it is the ownership of that land which is crucial.  Land where the living is easy is like the Garden of Eden.  The World with its wonders is a cornucopia of all things that make life worth living.  Educating the landless and the poor and homeless makes more sense than rounding them up and training them to be bombers and commit suicide for a life after death that will never come.

The choice is ours.  Give a man a gun or give him an education.  While cynical and greedy men control the UN, the European Union and the U.S. their counterparts in the Islamic culture hand out guns and bombs and calls this good.