PAX by Richard Dante - HTML preview

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CHAPTER 2

Nearly two thousand years after the first Messiah was born, there came a new peace maker. This one however, was born in an age when philosophies were based on scientific thought, not ancient fables:

And so, It came to pass in the late nineteen hundreds a brilliant etymologist, Dr.

Orville Peace, Ph.D., wed Olive Pound. They married at thirty and at thirty-one Olive gave birth to a bouncing baby boy. Orville suggested, and Olive agreed, they should name the boy Warren after his paternal grandfather. The couple doted on the child and spoiled him with attention. Still, they had other responsibilities and life must go on. Dr.

Orville, a much respected professor, taught at Harvard, while Olive, an efficient mother and housewife, kept an immaculate home. Each weekday morning, following a healthy breakfast, she sent her husband off to teach with a farewell kiss.

After clearing away and loading the dishwasher she made it her habit to retire to the family room to watch the early news before launching into her other chores. During these viewing sessions, Baby Warren sat on her lap. From the beginning he was bombarded with the brutality reported by the media. There was a horrendous mix of road rage, assassinations, domestic violence, gang wars, and savagery occurring in battles on the international front, The news rocked the child with an unending spectacle of horrors. From this early beginning, all the killing disturbed Warren as he watched human beings being exterminated.

Following the news his mother would place him in his playpen while she did her housework. She left the television on, usually tuned it to PBS. Once , when she decided maybe the baby would prefer cartoons, she switched channels. Surprisingly this set Baby Warren to squalling until she switched back to the educational channel.

As he watched the documentaries and teaching programs he was quiet and attentive, giving her time to complete her housework.

The boy had inherited the best attributes of his parents: his mothers deep blue eyes, fathers dark hair and the intelligence of both. He began to walk and talk at an early age and his mother, assuming he had her and her husbands extraordinary IQs, decided he must also be gifted. At less than a year old she began showing him children‟s books. He spent hours pouring over the pictures and words, making rapid progress in his desire to learn.

When Olive pointed out her observations to her husband, Orville also became involved in the improvement project and bought complicated puzzles for the boy to solve. Amazed by the child‟s progress, they sensed they had a genius on their hands.

By the time he reached kindergarten, he was reading and writing at the sixth grade level, and his parents entered him in a school for gifted children. At six, his father bought him his first chemistry set and he became an expert at testing the acidity of urine with its litmus paper. As the years passed, he excelled at everything he studied: math, science, literature, language, philosophy, including a fascination with psychology and the workings of the human mind. Though his extraordinary intellect gave him geek status, he grew up personable and charming and was popular with his peers, girls and boys alike. Early on, the youngster realized a healthy mind needed a healthy body and went out of sports. In college he became the Harvard team‟s star quarterback and his brilliant plays carried them to the national championship.

Still, burning in the back of his mind was an obsession to find a way to bring peace to the world. Since his infant days watching the news on his mother‟s knee he‟d continued to observe, listen and read about the the planet‟s chaos. Driven to stop the killing, he wanted to know why human beings were so determined to snuff one another out, and read everything he could on the quirks of the human mind. Wanting to reverse the process of human violence, he majored at Harvard in biology and chemistry and minored in psychology. Slowly a plan began to form in his mind. In his study of the human psyche, he found proof in the old cliché: It takes all kinds of people to make up a world. His studies had shown nearly every being on earth had some form of mental aberration. A small percentage was truly good, while another equally small group were rotten to the core. There may be saints who approached perfection, yet there were also bipolar terrorist tyrants who reeked of narcism, paranoia and schizophrenia; brutalizing everyone around them.

In between was the vast majority who might be kind and generous on the surface, but harbored a dark side within. Deep in their brains was an evil force which could turn cruel and violent when aroused. There were as many causes for this instability as there were people on earth. A great majority were simply gullible and easily influenced by ruthless leaders. The more he studied and learned about the dark side of humans, the more determined he became to pull them out of the dark and into the light.

Meanwhile like any normal young man, he fell in love. Her name was Emily. She was beautiful, intelligent and affectionate. He simply adored her. He was anxious to marry, but Emily wasn‟t so sure marriage was what she wanted, she was more drawn toward a successful career in medicine than that of a wife, no matter how desirable her potential mate might be. Determined in all things, Warren decided he might have to get her pregnant to win her. He was athletic and worked out regularly. He was, Emily thought, a real hunk, and she certainly enjoyed making love with him as long as he practiced safe sex. However, unknown to Emily, Warren began to punch holes in his condoms or forget to wear them at all. He invited her to have sex regularly. But with all his efforts, his devious plan came to naught. For whatever reason he was unable to impregnate her, and Emily still refused to marry. Years went by as the couple remained true, but single.