New Horizons by Max Roy

                            The Savage Beast We are complex, we human animals. The range of human emotions occupies a wide stream, wider than the Nile or the Mississippi on a rampage. Perhaps it matches the Amazon at flood tide. From the ultimate of self-sacrifice for what we believe in to the ultimate in cruelty and hate for what we believe in, there appears to be no limit to what the human animal, his animal part, is capable of. Surely all of us have felt these waves of emotion coursing through our veins? Overwhelming love for another person or a cause can render us almost senseless, making the heart race, the limbs tremble. Anticipation can make us stop in our tracks, seeking to hold on to something solid for fear of falling over. Imagine our rage when our path to the realization of our dreams is blocked and we feel totally impotent? What if that rage is ...

                  Writing And Reading I am sending you messages on this page. You are reading what I have written. You may not know or care, but this act had its origin over 10,000 years ago. I care, so I am sharing the story with you. I care because I really love being able to communicate with you. I am blown away by the tortuous trail we had to follow to achieve what we think of as a simple act. Forget about recent innovations like computers and the internet. These events have changed our lives, my life, in an astoundingly short time. How we got here, though, was an agonizing evolutionary process, spread across wide stretches of our world and over many centuries of time. We know most about the development of the Sumerian language system which is the one related to the one we use in our daily lives. That story goes back to the eighth millennium before the Common Era. Recorded communication (found in M...

                        Heroes On My Mind! Challenges on every side, stress and turmoil! Don’t we feel like we’d like to find someplace to hide? Don’t we know that has never worked to solve our problems? Don’t we need leaders   who will resist those urges to run away, choosing to fight rather than take flight? Can we find the hero in ourselves who can swallow fears and do the right thing? Are we made of sterner stuff when the time comes to resist instead of continuing to submit? Isn’t this about choosing the kind of lives we hope to lead? Don’t we face these kinds of challenges wherever, whenever we are in our lives? In small ways and in big ways, all of us have to make decisions about next steps, today and tomorrow. These may seem like small things at the time, but they add up. They determine the direction we are going. The choices we are making, in the end, dictate where we all end ...

               Sweet And Sour Isn’t that the story of our lives? We can’t ever count on everything being smooth sailing. Our experiences inform us that that the unknowable futures will deliver a mixture of sweet and sour. Count yourself very lucky if the balance is tending in your favor. It matters so much where fate has dropped your body. You could have been born in the Sudan, somewhere in Darfur. I have flown over that desert region, hugging myself and hoping the single-engine plane I was in would land us at our destination. I was there on a Canadian aid mission arranging to deliver food to starving people. I remember being in the Kivu, a northern plateau in the Congo, trying to increase fruits and vegetable shipments to the capital Kinshasa, where only minute supplies came in by passenger plane. I remember working, as well, in Mauretania, in Senegal, in Burkina Faso, in Honduras, in Jamaica, and other places, too ma...