Slaughter House-Five for Breakfast

For breakfast I had my first stack of pancakes. Good for me. I have never been able to eat more than 2, so I decided to make five out of enough batter to make 2 big pancakes. Voila, I had a stack.

Over the breakfast table I was reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter House-Five, and it helped me to realize something about myself. I am conflicted about conflict, oh my.

In the book the Tralfamadorians seem to be enlightened creatures. They seem to be at ease with everything because they have seen everything and know how things are supposed to be. They know the future and yet accept the fact that it just is, so they do not attempt to change it.

The Tralfamadorians said at one point to Billy, “Today we do [have a peaceful planet]. On other days we have wars as horrible as any you've ever seen or read about. There isn't anything we can do about them, so we simply don't look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments...Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones."

Part of me agrees with this. I think that in one way, world peace is a pointless wish. War is just a part of life, just like birth and death. It's kind of like the two mysteries of life that Joseph Campbell talks about, one is death, and the other is that life must feed on life to survive. I think conflict and war is another mystery. We must have pain as well as happiness. We must be cruel if we are to be kind. We must be selfish if we are also selfless. We must hurt and we must help. It is life's curse, and we have our memories that never let us forget what we have done and what we haven't.

But then part of me is optimistic. Like I told Trav at the concert, for now...I am half emo and half hippie. My hippie side wants to believe that we can do better. I want to believe that we can change.

Humans really are animals. We have the same instincts, just humanized. On her birthday, my friend Kiele made the statement that she would rather have a civil war than a war in the Middle East. Her reasoning was that the way things are now let people stay detached and unreceptive. If we had a civil war, she said, then people would actually care and try to do something about it.

I think she was right in the sense that it is wrong to not care just because it doesn’t affect you directly. But then again, "better you than me" is a very animal point of view. It's all about survival. If a chicken pecks another chicken, the rest are not going to jump in and sacrifice themselves to save the wronged. They are going to keep their beaks shut and go about their life as usual.

Smack me if I'm wrong, but I don't want a civil war. No thanks. Shortage of food, constant danger, families breaking apart as new enemies, disruption in life as we know it... I don't wish for that.

There is never just good and evil. Life is much more complicated than that. There is always more to the story. It goes even farther than that...there is no right and wrong. There is rarely one correct way to solve things. I think my father has influenced me in this thinking.

The only thing that will never change is change... and so the only right way to go about tings is to know that there is no right way.

In my APUSH class at school last year, I always had trouble picking sides for discussions. I was never for or against an issue. I was always playing devils advocate. If someone can easily pick a side, then they must be closing their eyes to do so. It's never easy. Maybe someone that fights strongly for a single controversial cause has weighed every possibility. Well... in truth we are not Tralfamadorians; we cannot see everything at once...there is always a blip in the data...something that will turn your head and make you quiver in your decision. There is always more to look at. To make up your mind is to close it. But then again, if you never make up your mind… nothing ever happens. So what’s more important, to have an open mind and stay stationary in complexity, or to make change and move ahead in a direction that may not be right?