A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis
LESSONS LEARNED BY THE AUTHOR (Part 1)
Looking back on one’s life
One’s 75th birthday is a good time to look back on one’s life, to reflect on the deeper meaning of life-transforming experiences, to assess one’s contribution towards an ever-advancing civilization and to prepare a strategic plan for one’s remaining years. I left university in 1961 with the goal of leaving the world a better place and following my retirement in 2004 started to appraise my life. In many, many ways the world is better, but in ways that I found meaningful – the condition of the planet; the 15,000 people dying each day for lack of the basic essentials of life; the 21 million people living under conditions ideal for microbial emergence such as Ebola; the $178 billion a year flowing from the world’s poorest nations to the richest in the form of debt repayments; the 36 million people in slavery; the one trillion dollars spent on weapons annually; and of the fourteen million kids who died in 1989, nine million deaths could have been prevented for $2½ billion – there has been little or no improvement. I have not given up on my goal of leaving the world a better place, but I realize that I have made mistakes, that there is much room for improvement and that there are lessons to take to heart. Education is the foundation of my strategy and a chapter is devoted to each of the key issues that I felt a need to address.
MY EARLY LIFE
German planes flew over our house before dropping their bombs on London
I was born in May 1939, just four months before the outbreak of the second world war. My family lived forty miles from London on the coast facing France. At Southend, the mud flats are extensive, making it an ideal place for landing an invading force. German planes flew over our house before dropping their bombs on London. Some were shot down and exploded near us. The V-2 rockets – we called them doodle-bugs – passed overhead and were easily recognized from their sound. When they ran out of fuel and became silent we ran to the air raid shelter in the garden where we huddled, fearing the worst. At night we slept in a shelter in the living room, composed of a strong iron sheet on four sturdy pillars to protect ourselves from falling debris should the house be damaged.
I was one of those children
During the summer of 1940 my mother frequently took my older brother and me to the beach where large concrete blocks had been erected to make it difficult for German landing craft. I remember the flames coming out of the guns firing at the hundreds of planes flying overhead during the day-light raids. The opening scene in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe shows children with an identity card round their neck being evacuated to a safer area. I was one of those children. The family was broken up: my father was needed in London and my mother was needed in the Land Army. The country had become over-dependent on cheap food from the colonies and the German strategy was to sink our shipping with their U-boats. Thousands of women were needed to produce our food so we would not starve to death. My older brother and I were sent to boarding school until the danger of invasion was over and the family could be re-united.