From Rolling Stone magazine, May 28,1998, issue 787, p. 183:
Kurt Vonnegut On The Work To Be Done
The only specifically American inventions that have made this a better
world are Alcoholics Anonymous and jazz, and jazz has no bad side
effects.
But one piece of AA's advice to recovering addicts, that they live one
day at a time, so infects the brains of those who are wrecking the
planet as a life-support system nowadays, recovering addicts or not,
that it might as well be Hong Kong chicken flu or mad-cow disease. To
have gotten through Tuesday, say, with an atmosphere still breathable
and water still potable at bedtime is for those so afflicted to be as
happy as pigs in shit, so to speak.
Some accomplishment!
Rolling Stone has asked me to discover what the American Dream looks
like in the mind of some young person of my acquaintance, with the year
2000 hanging over his or her head by a thread, like the sword of
Damocles. Without even looking into such a mind, I can offer at least
this much comfort: The year 2000 has come and gone, and damned if we
didn't survive it!
Listen: The best information we have today is that Jesus was born in 5
B.C., or five years before Himself. Chalk that up as another miracle!
Yes, and that means that the 2,000th year of the Christian era was what
we mistakenly called "1995."
What apocalypse, what test of our determination to go on living, did we
endure back then? Friends and neighbors, young and old alike, think a
minute, think TV.
It was the O.J. Simpson case!
As for our young:
Those who graduate from high school or college this spring are not
Generation X or Y, as envious middle-aged baby boomers have been pleased
to tag them. They are as much Generation A as Adam and Eve were, as the
middle-aged baby boomers, their parents, used to be.
As I read the Book of Genesis, God didn't give Adam and Eve a whole
planet.
He gave them a manageable piece of property, for the sake of discussion
let's say 200 acres.
I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting
of some small part of the planet into something like safe and sane and
decent order.
There's a lot of cleaning up to do.
There's a lot of rebuilding to do, both spiritual and physical.
And, again, there's going to be a lot of happiness. Don't forget to
notice!
What painters and sculptors and writers do, incidentally, is put very
small properties indeed into good order, as best they can.
A painter thinks, "I can't fix the whole planet, but I can at least make
this square of canvas what it ought to be." And a sculptor thinks the
same about a lump of clay or marble. A writer thinks the same about a
piece of paper, conventionally eleven inches long and eight and a half
inches wide.
We're talking about something less than 200 acres, aren't we?
If not you, then surely your children will see the day when not one drop
of petroleum and not one whiff of natural gas is left to power any sort
of machinery, or cook or heat or light anything, and precious little
coal. Junkyard!
Chilblains in the wintertime, and darkness indoors and out when the sun
goes down? Light a candle made from the fat of a lower, dumber, deader
animal? Who's got a wooden match when there are no trees? Our century
should be called this: the Age of the Planet Gobblers. We, the ancestors
of all Generation A's still to come, inherited an aromatic, juicy
blue-green planet, and we ate it up!
In our defense, we can only say, "We never asked to be born such
prolific, voracious creatures in the first place. It would have been
much better for all concerned if we had been sea lions instead,
provided, of course, that nobody else got to be a human being, or a
great white shark, or a killer whale."
Meanwhile, there is jazz, which, as I've said, has no harmful side
effects. And I am put in mind now of a lawsuit against a pharmaceutical
manufacturer years back, in which the plaintiff's lawyer had this to say
about a certain pill, a nostrum that might be likened to our
indifference to what we are doing to our environment: "Death is not an
acceptable side effect."
