In These Times

I met a man in Nigeria years ago,
an Ibo,
who said he had three hundred relatives
he knew by name.
His wife had just had a baby.
They were going to take it
on foot
to be welcomed and marveled at
by as many of those relatives
as they could find,
even though
there was a war going on.
Wouldn’t you love to have been
such a famous baby?

I wish I could wave a magic wand
this Christmas,
and give every desperately lonesome
and hungry and lost American
man, woman, or child
the love and comfort and support
of an extended family.
Just two people and a babe in the manger,
given a heartless Government,
is no survival scheme.

Kurt Vonnegut, American Christmas Card 2004 

emona

Such possibilities still exist

“When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 

Vonnegut was a WWII vet and was present at the bombing of Dresden.

emona