As in a Petri dish, the strain that breaks down our resistance to violence and war needs to be cultured. I recall this as both young citizen and product of this culturing process.

My first memory of being cultured this way was as a boy watching black and white television with my great grandmother. It was cowboys and Indians. One of a group of attacking Indians was shot and killed by a settler and I exclaimed "Good!" My great grandmother, a wise and formidable Irish matriarch stopped me dead in my tracks and said, "Don't ever say 'good' about anyone being killed." Her rebuke made instant and eminent sense -- I didn't feel ashamed as much as I felt rerouted. She had it right -- the pervasive culturing was called into question and I became aware of a consciousness behind the camera that was taking aim at me just as the settlers were taking aim at the "marauding savages."

The big Hollywood bible epic about Moses had a chilling scene for a child -- and we all had to see that movie. God compelled the Egyptians to do His will with what would seem to be a terrorist attack by most standards. Our hero asked for the release of his people -- Pharaoh refused -- the next day the first born of every Egyptian family died. All we heard were the screams of mothers. They were faceless enemies from our perspective but we knew they could feel pain and we felt it served them right -- it did the job -- felt bad for the firstborn children but God had to do what He had to do. The enemy was entrenched and hardened and oppressive -- it got their attention and it gave our hero and his people the freedom He asked for. The firstborn were innocent but they were offered to us as appropriate targets for the creator of the universe. They were faceless victims of their kingdom's stubbornness and God's justice. That's how it was cultured for us. As children rooting for Moses we all felt -- "Whatever it takes."

The movie we saw again and again was Gunga-din, which had three charming, wisecracking, superior British soldiers representing the Western occupying force in India. The villain was a strange and evil Punjab committed to expelling the British from India who, as a final defiant act, jumped into a pit of vipers rather than be taken to English justice. The hero, Gunga din, was a simple tragicomic figure who embraced and helped the British troops as liberators rather than occupiers. It took decades for the detailed color of Ghandi to help clarify some of the complexities that were blurred by that particular black and white movie.

Later, as a first year college student I watched with a group of fellow students a documentary on the aftermath of the nuclear bomb attack on Hiroshima. The images were searing -- and the burns on the survivors were surreal -- as if special effects were used. But that was a portion of the awakening process -- it was Technicolor reality. Japanese doctors were trying to tend to the stoic, numbed victims... but wait, I remember thinking, "The Japanese had doctors?" Having that thought was alarming, embarrassing and revelatory. I was a product. Japanese, in the culturing Petri dish of my childhood, were delivered to us in the post war era as indifferent to human life -- fanatical -- barbaric -- torturing -- bamboo chutes under the nails, vicious and cold blooded lizards. "Horrible yellow monsters." And here was a young Japanese doctor gently peeling burned dead skin off the back of a woman who seemed to be mesmerized by a blast from an impulse that whited out her humanity then and in the ensuing years -- until that moment -- when a small group of American college students had a visceral response to the burned flesh of that and many other Japanese people. Flesh and blood is the beginning of our common thread. Those nerve endings and the capacity for that kind of pain is inherent in just being alive and as much as the Petri dish might cultivate the response of "Good" when one of the faceless others is hurt or killed, there is an evolved and redeemed response that must override the cultivated response.

Of course we all had childhood nightmares of Russians and communists invading our very neighborhoods; arresting our parents -- sending us off to camps. Vietnamese were called gooks and General Westmoreland was clear that they did not value human life the way we did. Detainees, Taliban, al Qaeda, Islamic fundamentalists, dead-enders -- more and more names will be forthcoming as the war expands -- all synonyms for non-human -- all as faceless and fierce and savage as the Indian shot by the settler that had boys in front of lots of televisions saying "Good."

In school our particular Catholic history book had a sketch of Karl Marx with his fist raised in front of a burning city juxtaposed with a picture of the pope blessing a scene of impossible serenity. We heard quotes from great American heroes -- "Give me liberty or give me death." "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." The heroic poem we learned and memorized -- "Charge of the Light Brigade" -- (the cover of Time magazine uses a phrase from that poem this week -- Valley of Death) "Ours is not to reason why / Ours is but to do and die." According to present analysis these are rather fanatical sentiments that can be used and appropriated for condemnable actions.

If we disobey the line that says "ours is not to reason why," we might ask, how does dying or killing help? What cause is served by taking yours or another's life? As a way of oppressing or liberating or avenging or securing it is fatally flawed. It's not what this way of solving problems is in the service of -- it is the way itself that needs to be uncultured. The people in the World Trade Center towers were faceless screams to someone. They were considered either culpable or collateral. To someone, their lives mattered only to the extent that taking them made their point. The fact that life doesn't matter, as an agenda is advanced, is the flaw -- that is the evil. Yes -- there is no moral relativism -- no one -- not even a commandeered God has the right to arrest the destiny of the full life span of any human being. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Saigon, New York, Baghdad -- these actions are the harvest of seeds planted as it plants seeds for more bitter harvests.

As the seeds germinate the need for war needs to be cultured. Even as presidents during post school shootings tell high school students that violence is no way to resolve problems, those same students are sold war movie after war movie; headline after headline; slow motion reportage of well-armed soldiers trudging through hostile foreign lands who, we are told, are there for humanitarian reasons and for the purposes of freedom. Culturing war is a universal practice -- a necessity for some. Cultivating a new heroism is the hope. Culturing war, as with most culturing processes, is done to isolate a toxic agent which can then be addressed with an antidote. We search for that antidote daily as the culture of war grows.

Bill C. Davis is a playwright. www.billcdavis.com