August 25: Peter Paul Mound Bar, Always Has, Always Will

Billy Pilgrim got onto a chartered airplane in Ilium twenty-five years after that.  He knew it was going to crash, but he didn't want to make a fool of himself by saying so.  It was supposed to carry Billy and twenty-eight other optometrists to a convention in Montreal.

His wife, Valencia, was outside, and his father-in-law, Lionel Merble, was strapped to the seat beside him.

Lionel Merble was a machine.  Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every creature and plant in the Universe is a machine.  It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines.

Outside the plane, the machine named Valencia Merble Pilgrim was eating a Peter Paul Mound Bar and waving bye-bye.

There's something in this passage that makes me a little anxious and sad.  Billy knows his plane is going to crash.  He knows that the people who are with him on the airplane are going to die and that he himself is going to be severely injured.  Yet, he doesn't do anything to prevent the crash.  He straps himself into his seat and waits for the moment.  As the Tralfamadorians say, it has happened this way, and it will always happen this way. 

If I applied Vonnegut's line of thought to my own life, I suppose I would be a lot calmer about the future, since I can't do anything to affect change.  If I'm going to die tomorrow, I'm not going to be able to avoid the car that's going to hit me, so I might as well just go about my life as normal.  Somehow, that car will find me.  It always has and always will.

Of course, this leaves no room for human free will to alter the course of events.  That means that Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States, and he always will be elected.  James Dean will always die in a car crash at the age of 24, and Abraham Lincoln will always be assassinated at Ford Theater.  Most speculative fiction enforces this idea.  Changing the past is a bad idea.  It harms the future in terrible ways. 

That doesn't mean that, if I had the opportunity, I wouldn't travel into the past and buy as many shares of Apple as I could.  It also doesn't mean that I wouldn't kill Adolf Hitler as a child if I could.  But, if doing these things would mean that I wouldn't meet and fall in love with my wife, or that my kids wouldn't be born, I would probably be just like Billy.  I would strap myself into my airplane seat, sit back, close my eyes, and wait for the plane to fall out of the sky.

Saint Marty is thankful for his past and present and future tonight.  Airplane crash or no airplane crash.