In this bloody war on terrorism, we should remind ourselves of the wickedest terrors of all: AIDS, cancer, diabetes, neurological diseases and strokes, heart failure, life-threatening indifference, environmental decay, hunger and homelessness, and the ranking number one threat of all – ignorance.

Ignorance, because that insidious devil is what is at the heart of all the others. With the evaporation of ignorance from AIDS research, AIDS vanishes from the world forever. With the evaporation of ignorance from diabetes, cancer, and MDA research, these cruel ills will vanish forever. And the same thing goes for almost every ill that faces humankind.

So the most meaningful front on the war against terror is the war against ignorance.

The good news is it’s absolutely winnable and everybody can participate. I challenge everyone – no, I plead with everyone – to forgo your next lobster meal, or postpone buying your next designer jeans, to not purchase that next small luxury item, and use that money and time instead to read something about these evils facing us. Don’t leave it all up to the professionals who are being paid to find the cures. Participate. There are six billion of us. If we all add the tiniest fraction of momentum to fueling these worthy causes, the accumulated momentum will be enormous. Just knowing about a problem increases the chances that we will contribute something meaningful to its solution, even if what we contribute is simply to spread awareness of the problem.

Great, meaningful, epic-making discoveries have been made by amateurs throughout the ages. Archeological, comet, and asteroid finds have come through amateurs. Charles Darwin was an amateur. And so was Michael Faraday. And what about Abraham Lincoln!

The thing is, make the brain do something it’s not accustomed to doing. Read Faulkner, Kant, Einstein, biology books, history books, anything you don’t normally read but is significant in the accumulated knowledge reserves of mankind. Doing this exercises the brain in new ways, it creates new highways of thought, new paths of electrical activity, through the trillions of brain cells waiting patiently to be utilized and developed by each one of us.

If you are right-handed, make it a practice to do a few things with your left hand, for 10 or 15 minutes each day. If you’re left-handed, use the right hand for this exercise. Perhaps write a paragraph with your least used hand describing what it’s like to write with your least used hand. Since one side of the brain controls the opposite side of the body, this will give both sides of your brain good exercise and increase the neural pathways and electrical traffic between them.

It does not use old neural pathways exclusively but creates new ones that are added to the growing map of knowledge and understanding, and bioelectrical activity. No matter how smart you think you are, you can always learn more, to the benefit of everyone including yourself and the selves of your loved ones.

Stop waiting for it to happen. Stop waiting for the means to go to school. You’re in school now – the greatest school on earth, the earth itself and everything it embodies. Should the opportunity arise that you can attend a school to obtain a degree, go for it, but what you learn today will give you a running start for that formal education tomorrow.

The core of learning is curiosity and discovery. It is not whip-driven work. We all know that children have this high degree of curiosity and a wide angle of freedom from inhibition to focus it in. Our job, of course, is to encourage their curiosity down positive paths and nudge it carefully away from dangers.

But we can certainly learn something from the purity of their curiosity, the energy of learning that they embody. We can awaken the child within our own selves and nudge it carefully toward great victories and advances in science, ethics, religion, and all other positive fields of expression, no matter who we are.