From the window in my hotel room, I can see yet another church—this one is huge and made from bricks. If a service is happening there at this moment, I'm pretty sure the pastor is impressing upon his flock the importance of remembering and honoring our country's war dead. Their sacrifice was the supreme sacrifice. They died for our freedoms and our God.

Near the hotel room's window (trees, cross, trucks, hill, clouds, sky), there's a flatscreen TV that's linked to a universe of channels. One of these channels showed Return of the Jedi last night. I entered the film near its end: Luke is in space dealing with his father and his father's boss, and the rebels and a tribe of primitive teddy bears are fighting Imperial Stormtroopers on the forest moon of Endor. This is my favorite moment in that long battle sequence...

The blast, the smoke, the smoke clears, the bodies, the rise, the hand, the realization, the wailing. What does this scene reveal? Ewoks, like humans, have the mental ability to recognize the dead.

Compare the fictional Ewok death scene with this real one, which was captured in an animal reservation in Zambia...

As you can see, the adult chimpanzee is unable to grasp the death of the child chimpanzee. It does not know what to do. It goes to the corpse, shakes it, tries to wake it—but nothing happens. It just can't understand that this immobility is/means death. The Ewok, however, can make this connection. It knows almost right away that his/her friend has lost its life. It also knows that death is final. The Ewok is more human than the chimpanzee. The Ewok can remember and honor its dead.