When our dinner was served Anton put me to the test. "Here is your chance to say, grace, in the way it should be done," said Anton and smiled at me. "Let me hear it in the truly American way."

      "You gave me two choices, Anton? Do you want to hear it the American way, or the way it should be done? Which one should I choose?"

      "The right one of course, Peter."

      "In this case you better start eating, Anton. I'll tell you about it while we eat, and I tell it to you in the way it happened a few months ago during the local hearing for our nudist beach project back home in North Carolina.

      I paused and waited for her reaction, her protest. But there was none.

      "Here it goes: We had bought a stretch of an isolated private beachfront with the idea to give the people of America a chance to have a holiday away from the world of lying to themselves and covering things up; away from the world of being divided and isolated from their humanity. Our invitation was designed to take people back to the days before the proverbial tree of knowledge was invented that causes people to look at themselves and one-another with shame. A nudist beach brings out that kind of honesty with oneself and one-another, the kind that one doesn't find in any other place. That's also the environment in which I met Ursula. I met her at one of those beaches in Leipzig. She had arranged it that way. I suppose Ursula told you about it."

      Anton nodded.

      "Anyway, at our hearing for getting permission to do the same in America a member of the old priesthood had a few nasty words to say about our project and also about us as being the scum of mankind descending onto their God fearing community with a rage that would drive the living faith out their soul. I told the man of The Cloth that the people that I had seen at these beaches in other lands were indeed not God-fearing people. I had said they were more inclined to honor God by honoring one another as the brightest stars of creation. At this point an old farmer stood up and addressed the man of The Cloth. He pointed out to him that he had become a God-fearing man by bitter experience as a bomber pilot during World War II. He told us how the chaplain always said to him in a reassuring and authoritative tone of voice, 'my son, God is on our side, God is your copilot.'

     "Then the farmer told us how he in an armada of a thousand bombers had dropped three quarters of a million firebombs onto a defenseless city and burned half a million people to death in a single night. He said that he indeed feared God with a sense of horror in his heart, because the God that he had loved as a child had become a murderer.

     "Then another man stood up during the hearing and suggested that we Americans owed a great debt to humanity for all the horrible things we had done and were still doing, and that the time had come for us to begin to repay this debt. He suggested for starters that our nation should commit itself to eradicate homelessness and slum living by building a million new houses in America and giving them away for free. He said that with the proper infrastructures in place we would be able to build those million new houses for the same amount that we were currently spending to build only three of the latest bomber aircraft that are costing us more than $2 billion a piece. He said that the technologies exist to produce those million new houses inexpensively from the best building material on the planet and produce them in automated industrial production facilities, together with what is required for the service infrastructures. The man said that if we did this great thing for the homeless and the poor, and also for one another, we would not only uplift America with a bright new human face, but would be uplifting the whole world in the process by inspiring other nation to do the same and helping them in the process. We would turn away from spending our resources on killing people to uplifting people. The man said that by doing this single thing we would revolutionize the world and virtually every aspect of civilization, from construction to clothing, from farming to transportation, including finance, politics, science, culture, health care and education. He told us that the technologies to do all of this already exist. Even the energy resources exist, and the materials that are needed exist in near infinite abundance. All we needed to do, he said, would be to utilize what we've already got in ourselves as human beings, beginning with utilizing our technology of grace, the light of our humanity. He said in essence that the light of our humanity can only be manifest by the Principle of Universal Love being lived in everyday life."

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Stories about War from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche