Most cops are not looking for understanding. They work in a world filled with a sense - real or imagined - of danger lurking around each corner and every hallway. Most cops are merely looking for respect.

During the course of any normal day, I usually pay more attention to assembling a grocery list than I do to reading movie reviews, although there are a more than a few film critics who bring huge insight to their work.

It's your glove, your baseball glove. It's got a soul, a memory all its own, and a future that never fades because it has never let go of the grasp the past has on you and so many others.

Unlike other professions - doctor, lawyer, teacher, journalist, sales clerk, stock broker - when a cop makes a bad mistake, it could mean someone is dead. They take home mental baggage unlike anything carried in almost every other job.

So long as peace is not attained by law (so argue the advocates of armaments) the military protection of a country must not be undermined, and until such is the case disarmament is impossible.

I've been a war reporter and a human rights defender. A professor and a columnist. A diplomat and - by far most thrillingly - a mother. And what I've learned from all these experiences is that any change worth making is going to be hard. Period.

With the end of the cold war, all the 'isms' of the 20th century - Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism - have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind.

It has been, after all, 11 years, more than a decade now, of defiance of U.N. resolutions by Saddam Hussein. Every obligation that he signed onto after the Gulf War, so that he would not be a threat to peace and security, he has ignored and flaunted.