The Days with Kurt Vonnegut

The first reading from Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was a lecture to the graduating class of 1970. He talked about how science was destroying us, examples would be nuclear weapons and WWII in general. He mentioned how science said we had to evolve into better monkeys with bigger brains and how that idea shouldn’t be applied to us because we don’t really need bigger brains but reduce selfish acts. Vonnegut also went about confessing that he was a pessimist and that he lied to get his wife to marry him, have babies, etc. Anyways back to the main point, science isn’t always the answer to all of our problems. Before I forget, he also mentioned that as young people we should spend our time fooling around and let the older folks save the world.

The second part of the reading went over architecture, diseases, and a bunch of other things he criticized about. He made so many witty comments over cigarettes that didn’t kill him so he’s going to sue the company that made it, dentistry that’s keeping people alive, and stop trying to prevent people from having pneumonia or “the old people’s friend.” He made lots of comments on things which I’m not about to fill my blog page with since I’m already dying from laughter.

Reflection/Response/Analysis:

He is just one funny guy, and he made me laugh so hard. I didn’t really get much out of the readings but one thing for sure I realized some of the things he said were true. Science did hurt us in some ways and we need to spend money on each other not weapons of mass destruction. Anyways, I really enjoyed reading the second part of the assigned readings because it talked about Martians in Manhattan that eat homeless people and their bodily waste was gasoline… (thinks to self) so that’s where we get gas to drive cars.