I was hooked. We human beings are predators, anyway – the deadliest and most feared on the planet – and it takes very little, when we are young, to get our bloodthirsty juices flowing. Not for nothing does the military prefer young, impressionable recruits. I began devising more effective weapons for the never-ending combat between my little band of pals and the notorious Mary Lou Rosenthal Gang from half a block farther up Lancaster Street.

My family moved away from that scene when I was only eight; but before that time I had devised a long-range catapult out of scrap boards, a discarded hinge, and strips of inner tubing. Our field of battle was a vacant lot thickly overgrown with sumac; her gang’s camp was in one corner, ours in the one opposite. My ammunition was balls of horse manure seasoned in the summer sun. I could tell when I had the range by the loud cries of disgust from the far side of the jungle. I’ve often thought since then that if I could have exercised in my everyday pursuits the same creativity and energy that I did in my military efforts, I’d’ve been a billionaire by the age of thirty.

I went on from there to traumatizing frogs; shooting almost anything that moved, starting with bow and arrow; and moving on to a .22 rifle, and finally deer rifles. Then, after about 70 years, I grew old and, more important, grew up, and began to feel that the animals I was terrorizing had just as much right to the gift of life as I, and that I owed them a great debt. There’s no question I’ll never get it paid off.

We’re complicated characters, we humans. Believed by many to have been created in the image of God, we almost willfully belie that pretension daily. We’ve thoughtfully added a provision for forgiveness, but it’s hard to square that with the purposefulness with which we pursue the confusion or death of our fellow beings. In a memorable scene in the movie Gettysburg, adapted from a novel by Michael Shaara, Joshua Chamberlain, the intrepid colonel of the 20th Maine, rests against a tree beside his aide, the very Irish Sergeant Buster Kilrain. After the peacetime philosophy professor Chamberlain rhapsodizes about “the divine spark” in human beings – that they are like angels – Kilrain responds, maybe so, but if they are, they must be killer angels; that he’s seen many men of no more value than a dead dog.

Take your pick. On the one hand, and in our best moments, we construct institutions and laws to protect us from our own worst impulses; on the other, in the pursuit of power or money, we labor busily to subvert those same institutions we’ve created. Just today, as my dog and I enjoyed the warm sunshine and greening forest of Vermont, thousands of our fellow beings died – of live ammunition at Israel’s dead zone, of hunger and malnutrition, of substance abuse. Our nation boasts the world’s largest and most powerful military – it consumes more than half our budget – but our bridges and roads are crumbling, our educational system is being starved, and millions of our citizens have no access to affordable health care.

I think our problem is that we just haven’t grown up. We try to solve our perceived problems by, in effect, shooting them. The world, for many of us heirs to traditional American culture, has become a confusing and frightening place. Those who would lead us feed that fear and confusion by proposing simple solutions. There are none. The hateful rhetoric spread daily across the Internet betrays the extent to which they’ve succeeded. The brutal treatment by police of minority citizens at even routine traffic stops seems epidemic. The recent “middle-class tax cut” looks to be swallowed up by higher fuel prices as we retreat from international agreements. In Yeats’ image, the center seems to be no longer holding; everything reeks of tactics without strategy or principle; and Congress, like Chance Gardener, just watches.

A nation, in its obituary, won’t be accorded greatness for the glory of its victories, but for the care it took to ease the suffering of its humblest citizens. It’s quite possible that, if we put our energy into that instead of beating upon our shields, our obituary might be delayed much longer.