October 14: Another Living Soul, Love and Hate, Laughter

Billy's story ended very curiously in a suburb untouched by fire and explosions.  The guards and the Americans came at nightfall to an inn which was open for business.  There was candlelight.  There were fires in three fireplaces downstairs.  There were empty tables and chairs waiting for anyone who might come, and empty beds with covers turned down upstairs.  

There was a blind innkeeper and his sighted wife, who was the cook, and their two young daughters, who worked as waitresses and maids.  This family knew that Dresden was gone.  Those with eyes had seen it burn and burn, understood that they were on the edge of a desert now.  Still--they had opened for business, had polished the glasses and wound the clocks and stirred the fires, and waited and waited to see who would come.

There was no great flow of refugees from Dresden.  The clocks ticked on, the fires crackled, the translucent candles dripped.  And then there was a knock on the door, and in came four guards and one hundred American prisoners of war.

The innkeeper asked the guards if they had come from the city.

"Yes."

"Are there more people coming?"

And the guards said that, on the difficult route they had chosen, they had not seen another living soul.

It's a bleak moment.  An entire city filled with people bombed to extinction.  It's almost post-apocalyptic.  I'm sure that's how Vonnegut saw and experienced it.  It's a scene straight out of a science fiction novel.  Think of Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, kneeling in the sand in front of a destroyed Statue of Liberty, screaming, "God damn you all to hell!"

I believe in humanity.  Sure, the current political climate in the United States tries my faith.  Seeing Nazis marching in the streets of my country fills me with anger and disappointment and fear.  There isn't any other way to react to that if you are a compassionate, loving, sane person.  Unfortunately, where love exists, there will be hate.  Two sides of the coin.

Of course, the challenge is to not let hate and fear win.  If you call yourself a Christian, you believe that's why Christ came into the world--for love.  Jesus didn't like people who judged and punished.  He didn't throw stones.  He forgave and invited people to have dinner with him.  Of course, He was killed because He loved.

Now, there will be some people who read this post who will point out the terrible things that have been done by some "Christians."  My response to that criticism will always be the same--Jesus didn't preach hatred.  He preached love.  If you hate or harm or kill people in the name of Jesus Christ, you are not a Christian.  You're a hypocrite.

Some of the greatest tragedies of the human race have been committed in the name of God.  That doesn't mean that God is to blame.  That's all human.  Terrible things have been done by human beings in the name of science, too.  In the United States alone, over 20,000 frontal lobotomies were performed by 1951, the majority of them done to women.  The man who pioneered the lobotomy won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Human beings are flawed creatures.  We hate.  We kill.  We support dictators and Donald Trump.

Yet, mistakes can be corrected.  Love and joy are more powerful than fear and hate.  Anybody who has seen Monsters, Inc. knows this.

Saint Marty prefers laughter to screams.