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June 1 - June 2, 2018
most would find themselves “building or strengthening your communities. Please love that destiny, if it turns out to be yours—for communities are all that’s substantial about the world. The rest is hoop-la.
If your destiny was not to live and work in a big city or a foreign land, it was just as important and admirable, in Vonnegut’s view, to serve the place where you found yourself and felt yourself fulfilled, no matter how small or obscure that place might seem to the rest of the world.
I am being so silly because I pity you so much. I pity all of us so much. Life is going to be very tough again, just as soon as this is over.
Teaching, may I say, is the noblest profession of all in a democracy.
Mark Twain, at the end of a profoundly meaningful life, for which he never received a Nobel Prize, asked himself what it was we all lived for. He came up with six words which satisfied him. They satisfy me, too. They should satisfy you: “The good opinion of our neighbors.”
Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
I love science. All Humanists do. I’m particularly fond of the big bang theory. It goes like this: There was once all this nothing, and it was so much nothing that there wasn’t even such a thing as nothing. And then all of a sudden there was this great big BANG, and that’s where all this crap came from. Forget the Bible. Any questions?
Listen: All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being:
If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a Liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a Conservative. What could be simpler?
My politics in a nutshell: let’s stop giving corporations and newfangled contraptions what they need, and get back to giving human beings what we need.
even highly educated people need nonsensical, arbitrary symbols which will relate them to other people and the Earth and the Universe?
Yes, and let’s find a way to get ourselves and others extended families again.
Notice when you’re happy, and know when you’ve got enough.
I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting of some small part of the planet into something like safe and sane and decent order.
We must become a family in order to take care of one another the way families do. Now, nearly two hundred years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, written by a man who owned human slaves, I think we understand that our politicians and millionaires can do very little for us, except to take our money. There are sound reasons for this, I’m sure. I mean to study economics some day. Meanwhile, we must love one another and care for one another as best we can, and we must organize. You, our new generation of adults, must organize us.
