October 12: End of the War, Children, Old White Men

American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was moving.  They saw Billy and the rest moving down there.  The planes sprayed them with machine-gun bullets, but the bullets missed.  Then they saw some other people moving down by the riverside and they shot at them.  They hit some of them.  So it goes.

The idea was to hasten the end of the war.

Nobody was supposed to be alive.  The attack on Dresden was supposed to kill everything and everyone, thereby proving the superiority of the Allied forces and encouraging the Germans to surrender.  Of course, it took two nuclear bombs to convince Japan to give up.  In three months, Hitler will be dead, and the Nazis will wave the white flag.  Dresden, I suppose, was the beginning of the end.

I'm not sure if the American forces knew that Dresden was housing American prisoners of war.  If they did, then the bombing is not just an attack on German civilians.  It's an attack on our own soldiers.  Don't get me wrong--the lives of prisoners of war are not any more important than the lives of innocent women and children. 

Warfare is ugly.  That's one of the facts that I think Vonnegut is trying to drive home in Slaughterhouse.  When war happens, children are harmed.  After all, Vonnegut subtitled the novel "The Children's Crusade."  Wars aren't fought by old people.  They're fought by young men and women who have barely stepped out of their graduation caps and gowns.

Now, the world is in great turmoil.  Great Britain is preparing for possible armed conflict with North Korea.  The President of the United States keeps hinting at something big coming.  It's terrifying to think that old white men are making decisions that may cause the deaths of an entire generation of human beings.

Certainly, not all wars are unjustified.  The Nazis needed to be stopped.  Slavery in the United States needed to come to an end.  That doesn't change the fact that wars are horrifying events, full of tragedy and sorrow.  And the leaders who call for war sit back in their homes, completely safe and worry-free.

Saint Marty thinks that if a leader of any country declares war, his family needs to be sent to the front lines to fight.  It may mean less war, more negotiation.  And chocolate chip cookies.

January 4: Dirty Old Men, Liberal Thing, Baby Killer

"Well, I know," she said.  "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men.  And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them.  And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

Vonnegut is visiting a war buddy in Cape Cod, to talk about their shared experiences and the bombing of Dresden.  Vonnegut's still struggling with his war book, and he's trying to gather material.  He is sitting in the kitchen with his buddy when his buddy's wife confronts him.  She is furious at the idea of Vonnegut's book, accusing him of wanting to glorify war, thereby perpetuating it.

I understand the wife's anger.   A lot of adults don't think enough about the future.  Don't reflect on the repercussions of their actions.  Writers write books about war, making it sound glorious and heroic.  (Now, there certainly are heroes in war, but those heroes are not generally celebrated for taking lives.  They are celebrated saving lives.  But most of war is terrifying and bloody, fought by young people who are only a few years out of high school.  Babies, as Vonnegut's friend's wife says.)

Business people drill for oil without thinking of renewable energy sources.  Politicians repeal laws that help the poor.  Countries close their borders to refugees who are starving and terrified.  There are immediate benefits to all of these actions.  More and cheaper gasoline.  Balanced governmental budgets.  A false sense of security.  In the end, however, our children will suffer.

Vonnegut befriends his buddy's wife by making a promise about his book:  "I tell you what . . . I'll call it The Children's Crusade."

Vonnegut was an old liberal.  I'm getting to be an old liberal.  A lot of people view the word "liberal" as some kind of insult, akin to "baby killer" or "ecoterrorist."  I don't get that.  Here's a question I always think about when it comes to the difference between being liberal and conservative:  If I were going to a dinner that included my favorite food in the whole world, would I want a conservative portion, or would I want a liberal portion?

Jesus Christ did not love conservatively.  He loved liberally--Jews, gentiles, men, women, children, beggars, thieves, prostitutes, lepers, tax collectors, soldiers, prisoners.  There was no holding back.  Above all, Jesus loved children, the "babies" as Vonnegut's friend's wife calls them.  In the babies, Christ saw the future of the world.

As you can tell, I'm thinking a lot about the future this evening, because of the incoming President of the United States; of the daily reports of terrorist attacks in places like Turkey and Syria; of the people who believe global warming is some kind of Chinese conspiracy theory; of the alarming worldwide trend to ignore or deny the needs of the poor and homeless and displaced.

Taking care of these problems is not a liberal thing or a conservative thing or a Christian thing or a Muslim thing.  It's not a Democrat thing or a Republican thing.  It's a human thing.  As Vonnegut says, it's a crusade for the children.

Saint Marty is liberally grateful for his kids tonight.