June 26: Being Stupid, Dinosaur Bones, Dehydration

Billy expected the Tralfamadorians to be baffled and alarmed by all the wars and other forms of murder on Earth.  He expected them to fear that the Earthling combination of ferocity and spectacular weaponry might eventually destroy part of maybe all of the innocent Universe.  Science fiction led him to expect that.

But the subject of war never came up until Billy brought it up himself.  Somebody in the zoo crowd asked him through the lecturer what the most valuable thing he had learned on Tralfamdore was so far, and Billy replied, "How the inhabitants of a whole planet can live in peace!  As you know, I am from a planet that has been engaged in senseless slaughter since the beginning of time.  I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time."  This was true.  Billy saw the boiled bodies in Dresden.  "And I have lit my way in a prison at night with candles from the fat of humans who were butchered by the brothers and fathers of those schoolgirls who were boiled.  Earthlings must be the terrors of the Universe!  If other planets aren't now in danger from Earth, they soon will be.  So tell me the secret so I can take it back to Earth and save us all.  How can a planet live at peace?"

Billy felt that he spoken soaringly.  He was baffled when he saw the Tralfamadorians close their little hands on their eyes.  He knew from past experiences what this meant.  He was being stupid.

Billy thinks he's being profound, seeking to end wars and murders and violence on Earth.  He's spurning the destructive nature of the human race and turning toward Tralfamadorian peace.  Billy thinks his zookeepers will applaud his speech, maybe elevate him to the status of star attraction, right next to Spock from Vulcan or Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still.  Of course, as with almost everything else, Billy is wrong.  He's thinking like an Earthling again.  Shortsighted.  Three-dimensional.  He doesn't get the big picture.  Yet.

Of course, Billy's little speech seems pretty good to me, and probably to most inhabitants of Earth.  The human race does have a tendency to kill itself in various and horrific ways.  Wars.  Climate change.  Trumpcare.  We like finding new ways to increase pain and suffering and death.  It's our natural state.

I would like to say that we've gotten a little better since Billy first landed on Tralfamadore, but we really haven't.  We still drop bombs on people.  We still deny the existence of global warming.  And we still think that Google is a verb.  We haven't really gotten much past gnawing on dinosaur bones and fighting over water holes.  (Yes, that is a veiled reference to Kubrick's 2001:  A Space Odyssey.)

Today, my wife ended up in the ER.  She was dehydrated and had to get some IV fluids.  She's feeling much better now, but she spent a good portion of the weekend with a bucket in her lap, dry heaving.  It wasn't pleasant.  She has learned her lesson, however.  Water is our friend.

My wife is not dumb.  She knows how important it is to stay hydrated, especially after her surgery.  She has been on a liquid diet for the past two weeks and got a little over watered, if you get my drift.  So she stopped drinking as much, and she got sick.

That's what humans do.  We do things that harm us.  We go to war.  We back out of climate change accords.  We blow each other up.  And we do it over and over and over and over and over.  We don't learn from our mistakes.  Instead, we just make bigger mistakes.

Okay, I know that was a huge leap from my wife not drinking water to the depletion of the ozone, but you get it.  We will never have world peace or end world hunger or stop making stupid Adam Sandler movies.  Not until everyone on the planet is dehydrated enough to realize that they need to take a drink of water.  Hopefully I didn't push that metaphor too far.

Tonight, Saint Marty is thankful that his wife is full of water again.

June 23: Sex on Earth, Labels, Leaving Things in Better Shape

There were five sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in the creation of a new individual.  They looked identical to Billy--because their sex differences were all in the fourth dimension.

One of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the Tralfamadorians, incidentally had to do with sex on Earth.  They said their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction.  Again:  Billy couldn't possibly imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension.

The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension.  They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals.  There could be babies without female homosexuals.  There couldn't be babies without women over sixty-five years old.  There could be babies without men over sixty-five.  There couldn't be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth.  And so on.

It was gibberish to Billy.

Vonnegut really was ahead of his time with this discussion of sexes on Earth.  Back in the 1960s, he was talking about homosexuality, and not in any pejorative way.  Homosexuality is necessary for survival in the universe of Slaughterhouse.  Sex and sexuality are very fluid things.  That's a pretty amazing thing for Vonnegut to say.

In our country where the rights of all people who aren't white, male, heterosexual, Christian, and healthy are under attack by white, heterosexual, Christian, healthy men, perhaps every person in Congress needs to pick up a copy of Slaughterhouse Five to read.  Or maybe everyone in Congress needs to spend some time in a Tralfamadorian zoo.

I am not going to write about the Senate's version of Trumpcare in this post.  Not climbing up on a soapbox tonight.  I simply want to say that it really doesn't matter whether a person is gay, straight, Muslim, Christian, black, white, or blue.  Defining someone by any kind of label is dangerous.  I am more than a man or Christian or heterosexual or father or husband or poet or blogger.  I am a fellow traveler on this third rock from the Sun, trying to leave things in better shape than I found them when I arrived.

Every person is important.  I think that's Vonnegut's point in this little passage.  Everyone has something to contribute from the day that they're born to the day they die.  So it goes.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for the chance to make the world a better place.