Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [79]
“Let’s talk about incompatibility between parents and children, which happens often merely because of genetic rotten luck. In a nuclear family, children and parents can be locked in hellish close combat for twenty-one years and more. In an extended family, a child has scores of other homes to go to in search of love and understanding. He need not stay home and torture his parents, and he need not starve for love.
“In an extended family, anybody can bug out of his own house for months, and still be among relatives. Nobody has to go on a hopeless quest for friendly strangers, which is what most Americans have to do.
“Massage parlors come to mind—bus stations and bars.
“You graduates here are leaving an artificial extended family now. Even if you hated it here, you will find a nuclear family to be a very poor substitute for what you had here. As for those of us who have come to praise you for having graduated: we have fled here from loneliness, to be part of an artificial extended family for just a little while.
“And what we will all be seeking when we decamp, and for the rest of our lives, will be large, stable communities of like-minded people, which is to say relatives. They no longer exist. The lack of them is not only the main cause, but probably the only cause of our shapeless discontent in the midst of such prosperity.
“We thought we could do without tribes and clans. Well, we can’t.
“There was a time when I was avid to invent new religions and social orders. It has now penetrated my skull that such schemes will not work without the support of huge and gruesome police forces and prison systems, unless they are allowed to invent themselves. The emperor Constantine did not, after all, invent anything. He had many religions to choose from. He selected Christianity because it seemed to him to be the most refreshing.
“Hitler and Lenin and some others have also tried to refresh their people with ideas that had been around awhile. They chose abominably, as we know. It matters what we choose. And history and the deteriorating physical and moral environments are now telling us what we would rather not hear, what we would rather our children or grandchildren would hear: It is our turn to choose.
“At least we do not have to choose between various theories of magic, of ways to manipulate God and the devil and whatever, which is what our ancestors had to do. We no longer believe that God causes earthquakes and crop failures and plagues when He gets mad at us. We no longer imagine that He can be cooled off by sacrifices and festivals and gifts. I am so glad we don’t have to think up presents for Him anymore. What’s the perfect gift for someone who has everything?
“The perfect gift for somebody who has everything, of course, is nothing. Any gifts we have should be given to creatures right on the surface of the planet, it seems to me. If God gets angry about that, we can call in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There’s a very good chance they can calm Him down.
“The new moral code we choose may already have martyrs. It is difficult to spot such things. One corpse tends to look pretty much like another one—until the historians sort them out with the benefit of hindsight.
“We shall see what we shall see.
“For two thirds of my life I have been a pessimist. I am astonished to find myself an optimist now. I feel now that I have been underestimating the intelligence and resourcefulness of man. I honestly thought that we were so stupid that we would continue to tear the planet to pieces, to sell it to each other, to burn it up. I’ve never expected thermonuclear war. What seemed certain to me was that we would simply gobble up the planet out of boredom and greed, not in centuries, but in