Greg McKeown

That wasn't the thing.

Even now, I think, yeah, that's not the thing to have done.

But nor did I have to be imprisoned on a moral continuum that was so different in kind to where he was coming from in his own experience with it.

And so from that, we were able to work through it and became, I would say, better friends afterwards.

I remember buying him a poster of Michael Jordan.

He was a big basketball player.

And it was the wings one way you've got Jordan.

Wings spread out.

It's called Wings.

And it's quite impressive looking picture.

And just wrote to him, to the seagull killer.

And that was just a moment of laughter between us because we had found shared meaning and understanding.

And yeah, I think in that simple, in some ways, trivial story of my just barely out of youth, that I think a lot can be made of how much we start to understand ourselves and only can understand ourselves through understanding other people and being understood by them.

Well, I think there is a golden thread running through it as it is, even if it's different to the one that is imagined.

And I think you're right.

In a sense, however awful what I'm about to say is, it's not hard to understand.

how humans in a military setting come to think of the enemy as less than human.

First of all, you're being told that.

Secondly, it helps to resolve the cognitive dissonance that fighting and killing each other inherently produces, has to produce.

This is a way to resolve it.