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By Howard Nemerov

It’s the oozing globs of sweat under my armpits as I stuff my sentences with jargon and a scrambled, panicked outpouring of words, hoping to impress the people judging me. All of it fueled by my aching, natural need to belong.

It takes great courage to express it. Most women are better at it than men.

Only humans, no other animal species, can claim the following specialties concerning aggression:
1. We can abstract it and direct it toward adversaries a continent away.
2. Confuse it with sexual behavior.
3. Patent weapons for use against our enemies instead of using brute force like other animals.
4. Organize complete strangers into platoons, battalions and regiments willing to give up their lives for each other even though they are unconnected by families, cousins or local communities.
5. We can be extraordinarily passive aggressive and exaggeratingly ritualistic in showing contempt. We’re experts at damning with faint praise which no other animals can do.
6. Pay good money for the right kind of violence, vote for violent people, even mate with them.
7. The ways in which we are violent are deeply rooted in culture. When people kill in Minnesota, it’s not the ritualized, street gang violence they have in New York City or Miami. In Minnesota, they commit cold-blooded murders that incubate in the winters.

Happy birthday, Woody Guthrie. One day he got tired of listening to Kate Smith singing God Bless America and wrote This Land is Your Land which many of us now believe is the true American national anthem.