Page 16 RAIN Aug.-Sept. 1982 -#•3^ m I by Patrick Mazza War. Its tidings shout at us from the newspaper headline and the television tube. The fearful potenHal of greater wars, final wars, fills us with a sense that the most significant decisions in human history will be made within the next 20 years. Growing numbers of us realize we stand at the junction of two roads — real peace or absolute destruction. The choices narrow. The likelihood of some form of fundamental change grows. What will it be? If the change is to be positive, we must look back to the very roots of civilization. We must understand that a course set 6,000 years ago in the Tigris-Euphrates River Basin has culminated in our own century. Our choice now is to either follow that course to desolation or set a new bearing, one that is our own. What began in Mesopotamia, very simply, was a new form of scK^ organization — the state. In contrast to the diffuse patterns of authority that had existed before — Ancil Nance
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