December 4: All Want Dignity, Follower, Simplest Rules

O'Hare had a little notebook with him, and printed in the back of it were postal rates and airline distances and the altitudes of famous mountains and other key facts about the world.  He was looking up the population of Dresden, which wasn't in the notebook, when he came across this, which he gave me to read:

On an average, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day.  During that same day, 10,000 persons, on an average, will have starved to death or died from malnutrition.  So it goes.  In addition 123,000 person will die for other reasons.  So it goes.  This leaves a net gain of about 191,000 each day in the world.  The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000.

"I suppose they will all want dignity," I said.

"I suppose," said O'Hare. 

According to a website I just consulted, the world's population in the year 2000 was 6,145,006,989.  So that little prediction in Slaughterhouse was fairly accurate, give or take about 900,000 people.  I'm sure that, back in 1969 when Vonnegut first published his little war novel, the concept of having seven billion people existing on the planet was a little terrifying.

The world's population passed that number several years ago now.  We are dealing with all kinds of problems as a result.  Climate change.  The resurgence of Nazis in the world.  Donald Trump and company.  In some ways, I think our world is more surreal than the future that Vonnegut predicted.

However, what strikes me the strongest in that little passage above is Vonnegut's comment near the end:  "I suppose they will all want dignity."  He's saying this tongue-in-cheek, of course.  Vonnegut knows that all human beings deserve dignity.  During the bombing of Dresden, he saw the very worst acts that humans could perpetrate against each other.  That experience guided his entire adult working life, I think. 

So, the takeaway from Slaughterhouse today is this:  it doesn't matter what color your skin is, who you love, whether you are male or female, what God you worship--everybody deserves dignity and respect.  Jesus Christ believed this.  So did Muhammad and Buddha. Unfortunately, many "followers" of Jesus and Muhammad choose to ignore this fact.

Why is it that the simplest rules are the most difficult for people to follow?

Saint Marty doesn't have an easy answer to that question.