I cringed, remembering Sylvia's reaction. Half the audience was female.

      "Of course, three thousand people can't fit around the few tables at Alberto's pub," he continued, "so, let me share with you what I have found there. It's been an eye opener." He began to grin.

      "Common courtesy dictates that girl watching isn't something a nice gentleman does," he continued. "Curtsey demands that one shut ones eyes against the incredible wonder that is represented in men and women. Does such a demand make sense? Of course it doesn't make sense. Imagine yourself sitting there, a beautiful person comes your way, you force your eyes shut, you look away, you deny yourself the joy of experiencing one of the most lovely delights of living, and so, immediately, you're facing a conflict with yourself. You create a paradox. You're drawn into a terrible conflict with yourself as you realize that you lack the resources to confront rationally what your honesty demands. Consequently, you don't do anything. But what do you do in such a case to your own feelings, to your nature as a human being when you can't be honest with yourself? That is where I think the fragmentation of mankind has begun."

      Tony suggested that this conflict isn't anything new. He said that humanity has acquired the capability to land on the moon, and go beyond it and explore the moons of Jupiter in exquisite detail. The technological steps behind such achievements are phenomenal, and we have taken those steps. "But in the most vital area of living, we continue to behave like Stone Age people," he said. "Something is spiritually lacking in our society that now fuels the threat of nuclear annihilation," he warned.

      "Now, with this in mind, let's explore what specifically causes this huge gap between our development as human beings, in comparison with the immense growth in our technological development," he said and paused.

      He looked around the great, silent hall.

      "I tell you what makes that difference," he said. "The difference is one of procedure. Our so-called moral procedures have choked off the renaissance spirit that once had rescued us from more than a thousand years of dark ages. Ninety-eight-percent of all people on this planet had been living as serves prior to the Renaissance, or slaves, or scum lower than slaves. All this ended when the pioneers of the Renaissance put a new image of man before the people, the image of a human being, an image that people had learned to love. The amazing thing was that people learned to love themselves in that image. They accepted a truth that they could feel in their heart. They began a self-development on the foundation of that idea. They indeed fought for this, and they developed the idea further and discovered the underlying principle of it. They discover the principle of a wider love, the principle of universal. Out of that love they created great art, beauty, poetry, drama, and music. They created a whole New World in which they could express the newfound reality of themselves and their fellow beings.

      "Much of this has disappeared," he continued. "Only now and then, and rarely at the grass roots level, can one find a few traces of it remaining. Some of that honesty with ourselves about our wonderful humanity was reflected in the girls that we saw walking by at Alberto's pub. They were beautiful in their appearance, in their manners, in the way they were dressed, and in the way they smiled and carried themselves proudly. They had some of that Renaissance spirit left. They were in love with themselves as beautiful, valuable, human beings. One could feel that self-love. It was reflected in their appearance. Naturally, it touched a kindred chord in my soul. I fell in love with them. I embraced them in my thoughts. I feasted on that love that bound us together, even if it was but for a brief moment. I relished it. I opened my mind to it. Why should I have deprived myself of that, especially since there is so little of that left to be found? Why should have I bared my eyes and heart from making that connection from love to love? I was not exploiting them. I was not degrading them. I was merely acknowledging the beauty of their self-love. Naturally, that included an element of their sexuality, and so it should. After all, we are sexual beings. To deny that amounts to self-denial, and self-denial is the opposite of self-love. Self-denial takes us away from the truth."

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