It Matters (by Jeff Ostrander)

The story line:
Along the coast of the vast Atlantic ocean there lived an old man. Each day when the tide went out he would make his way along the beach for miles. Another man who lived not far away would occasionally watch as he vanished into the distance and later notice that he had returned. The neighbor also noticed that, as he walked, the old man would often stoop down to lift something from the sand and then toss it away into the water.
One day, when the old man went down to the beach this neighbor followed to satisfy his curiosity and, sure enough, as he watched, the old man bent down and gently lifted something from the sand and threw it into the ocean. By the time the old man made his next stop the neighbor had come near enough to see that he was picking up a starfish which had been stranded by the retreating tide and would, of course, die of dehydration before the tide returned. As the old man turned to return it to the ocean the neighbor called out with a degree of mockery in his voice, "Hey, old timer! What are you doing? This beach goes on for hundreds of miles, and thousands of starfish get washed up everyday! Surely you don't think that throwing a few back is going to matter." The old man listened and paused for a moment, then held the starfish in his hand out toward his neighbor. "It matters to this one."

Moral of the story:
All of us desire peace, but very few desire those things that make for peace.
The comment line:
While I worked for Hughes Network Systems, a telecom vendor whose base was in Germantown, MD, I used to travel as a field engineer. There was an office-mate that I used to travel with, his name was Civarath Tum. We both enjoyed watching National Geographic where wildlife shows always were big part of the debate.
To me, it looked aweful once a smaller animal got killed by a bigger, more agressive one and it was an unfortunate.
Civarath's philosophy was different. He saw such things as part of the way nature works - the bigger ones kill the smaller ones for survival - which was totally reasonable. We never disagreed on such fact though I still had an aweful feeling for the unfortunate animals that happened to be the ones that felt into the pattern of the nature as how things work.
of course he had his own reason to believe that's just the way life is and should be. Well, quite honestly, it seemed pretty logical and reasonable.
As time goes on, I have come to accept the fact that sometimes one man's problem is another man's opportunity for survival. Though I've always had a wishful thinking for that unfortunate man's mind. Imagine if he would say "What if someone saves me from that "law of nature" type of thing? Just like that particular starfish in the story above, it was surely grateful for its life that was saved by someone who steps an extra step out of the pattern of nature.
This reminds me a great quote that Thomas à Kempis once said, “All men desire peace, but very few desire those things which make for peace.”