Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

YOUNG PEOPLE STILL REFUSE TO SEE THE OBVIOUS IMPOSSIBILITY OF WORLD DISARMAMENT AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY. COULD BE FAULT OF NEW TESTAMENT

Their sort of common sense, holy, or not, and based on books Harvard men read routinely and without ill effects, had always seemed contemptible to most of their neighbors. Those same neighbors, and those who liked to guide their destinies without much opposition, now decided to be terrified by that common sense, especially when it was possessed by the foreign-born.

And I am now compelled to wonder if wisdom has ever existed or can ever exist. Might wisdom be as impossible in this particular universe as a perpetual-motion machine?

We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.

“You know what is finally going to kill this planet?” I said.

“A total lack of seriousness,” I said. “Nobody gives a damn anymore about what’s really going on, what’s going to happen next, or how we ever got into such a mess in the first place.”