Word: vonnegut
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Like his novels, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s message to the graduating class of Bennington College was by turns desolately winsome, merely bleak and utterly but almost gaily despondent. Confessing to congenital pessimism, Vonnegut told the graduates: "Everything is going to become unimaginably worse and never get better again...
...Still, Vonnegut had some suggestions: "We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us. But only in superstition is there hope. I beg you to believe in the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrater of the grandest dreams of God Almighty. If you can believe that and make others believe it, human beings might stop treating each other like garbage...
...Vonnegut also asked the graduates to take advantage of some of youth's prerogatives. A "great swindle of our time," he said, "is that people your age are supposed to save the world. I was a graduation speaker at a little preparatory school for girls on Cape Cod a couple of weeks ago. I told the girls that they were much too young to save the world and that after they got their diplomas, they should go swimming and sailing and walking, and just fool around...
...more bombs have been dropped on Laos than on any other country in the history of the world. A few years ago, there were 3 million people in Laos. Now there are somewhat below 2.5 million. For a little comparison, straight from Kurt Vonnegut, America killed 135,000 Germans at Dresden, 83,793 Japanese in Tokyo, and 71,379 at Hiroshima...
Then there is the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), whose majestic 310-ft. dome once dominated the center of Dresden. Like Hiroshima's Industrial Promotion Hall, it will be left in ruins, a mute reminder of the thought expressed by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in his Dresden novel, Slaughterhouse 5: "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre...