Louis Roney: Other wars

The last war we fight is an extension from the first. That is, all of life is a battle that we fight from the first skirmish to the last. A very intelligent doctor whom I knew said to me that in his profession he is always on the right side, but never wins in the end.

Life’s battle begins at the time we take our first breath, and we are fighting constantly to stay alive until we draw our last. One who has lived a great many years may tell you that life is for life’s sake, and has no point unless we find it, or create a philosophy for ourselves.

With his first breath, the baby may be wailing, “Let me live!” His last groans when he is 90, may be saying, “Give me just a while longer!” Life is called a precious commodity, and those who have life are seen to be blessed.

We human beings are surely not cowards: rather we are the bravest of the brave, for we often risk the very thing we are trying to save in the attempt to prolong it for others or ourselves.

It occurs to me that suicide is a special kind of death for it involves a guy who fights to live up until the moment he dies.

Along the way from our childhood to our last step, we mortals have invented many “quasi” wars to excite us and to entertain us — we call them “sports” and we go about pursuing them as enthusiastically as if our lives were really on the line. “Do or die for dear old Yale” is a football cheer that asks more than any mere game is worth. But we go through the motions of saying it just to generate “school spirit.” My senior year in high school when I played football, I remember that several boys around the country were killed while playing the game. I remember that we players spent a bit of time practicing falling down in ways that would not injure us. I remember a yarn about a footballer who played four professional seasons without injury, and on his walk home from his last game, dropped dead of a heart attack.

• Satisfaction: “Satisfaction” is a word that drips with different nuances. I like my grandmother’s concept of “divine dissatisfaction,” a state in which a higher power seems to have sent us a demand to provide solution for our most puzzling problems.

We all know that today’s solution may not solve tomorrow’s problem, and that human satisfaction is at best in a continual state of flux.

Yesteryear’s Japanese enemies are now our good trading buddies.

Yesterday’s freshly married couple is today writing checks to a divorce lawyer. And our last-elected big-wig is attempting haphazardly to extricate himself from the lies he told us in order to get us to vote him into high political office.

The satisfaction that one receives when he pays off a loan is a particular boon. And the satisfaction of winning a game from someone to whom one has previously lost, may be a picayune personal victory.

Everyone since Julius Caesar has been seeking satisfaction over the Gauls, or some other neighbors, and we must notice that, in truth, people seem happier to be bored when mired in discontent, than at liberty and without opposition. People will pay plenty of lucre to see the Yankees play the Dodgers, or Yale play Harvard — or tune in on all the TV “reality shows” where people watch folks badger each other, sometimes to unbelievably tragic ends. Our satisfaction sometimes comes from looking at the opponents we have managed to vanquish. More mature people, of course, will find most satisfaction within themselves for a job well done.

“Disciplining yourself to do what is right, although difficult, is the highroad to self-esteem and personal satisfaction,” said Margaret Thatcher (Brava Margaret!) “Young people are threatened by the use of advertising techniques that stimulate the inclination to avoid hard work, by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire,” said Pope John Paul II (Does the technique work, Your Grace?) “Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life,” said Linus Pauling (If curiosity killed the cat, you may meet lots of dead cats on the way!) “There are days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction,” said Salvatore Dali (On those days he must have done his best painting! He loved himself didn’t he?)