Arguably the greatest friend the working people in this country ever had, Eugene Debs, was from Terre Haute.
He said, “As long as there is a lower class I am in it, as long as there is a criminal class I am of it, as long as there is a soul in prison I am not free.”
It used to be admirable for Americans to talk that way.
Will some educated person here tell me what went wrong?
What I’m saying is that this is very-fertile soil here.
I’m not talking about corn and pigs.
I’m talking about growing important souls and intellects.
The people I choose to celebrate today, though, aren’t those Middle Westerners who became world famous.
Do you know, incidentally, that one of the most impossibly sophisticated, worldly persons ever to grace the planet, the composer and lyricist Cole Porter, the toast of New York and London and Paris, came from Pee-ru, Indiana?
Pee-ru, for heavens’ sakes.
Can you beat it? How close is that to Brazil and Kokomo?
The people I admire the heck out of today are those who built cities like this, with universities like this one, with symphony halls like that one, with art museums like the one over there somewhere, with libraries in every neighborhood. And the churches and hospitals. And the factories and stores. Utopia.
I’m talking to TV celebrities in airplanes again:
Hey, you monstrously overpaid electronic twerps:
“Down here” is where the real lives are led.
“Down here” is where the real work gets done.
The airplane itself was invented in Ohio.
So was Alcoholics Anonymous. The rear-view mirror.
Yes, and wonderful dancers all overs all over the world have come or will come from Butler University in Naptown. Are some of them here?
Some of you won’t stay home. But please don’t forget where you came from. I never did.
Notice when you’re happy, and know when you’ve got enough.
As for throwing money at problems: That’s what money is for.
My Uncle Alex Vonnegut, an insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania, taught me something very important. He said that when things are going really well we should be sure to notice it. He was talking about very simple occasions, not great victories. Maybe drinking lemonade under a shade tree, or smelling the aroma of a bakery, or fishing, or listening to music coming from a concert hall while standing in the dark outside, or, dare I say, after a kiss. He told me that it was important at such times to say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
Uncle Alex, who is buried in Crown Hill along with James Whitcomb Riley, and my sister, and my parents, and my grandparents, and my great grandparents, and John Dillinger, thought it was a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.
So do I.
You have been called “Generation X.”
You’re as much Generation A as Adam and Eve were.
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 two hundred 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!
VONNEGUT UNSTUCK—QUOTES TO PONDER
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“Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here!”
“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories.”
“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
“My father was a gun nut, like Ernest Hemingway, mainly to prove that he wasn’t effeminate, even though he was an architect and a painter. He didn’t get drunk and slug people. Shooting animals was enough.”
“The good earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”
“We have to be constantly jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
“You’re learning that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable social structure—that the older people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few day ago. So homes can fall apart and schools can fall apart, usually for childish reasons…”
“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
“When things go well for days on end, it is a hilarious accident.”
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to maintain it.
“Make love when you can. It’s good for you.”
“Male American artists don’t even have to shoot off guns any more. They can even be homosexuals, and the hell with it. This is good.”
“Queer travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
“Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. And since the creator of the universe is unknowable to us so far, we serve as best we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.”
“Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
“There is only one rule that I know, Goddam it, you’ve got to be kind.”
“I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another good idea by and by—and then we will have two good ideas.”
“A sane person in an insane society must appear insane.”
“It is true that some of the characters in my books speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hard-working men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. I was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.”
“Dear Future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.”
“We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet—the only one in the whole Milky Way—with a century of transportation whoopee. Our government in conducting a war on drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum! Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor’s dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens.”
“We are dancing animals.”
“Hopelessness is the mother of Originality.”
“Librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.”
“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
“I’m a space wanderer named Kurt.”
“So it goes…”
1 Fredonia College, Fredonia, New York
2 Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia
3 Rice University, Houston, Texas
4 The Indiana Civil Liberties Union (now The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana), Indianapolis, Indiana
5 Four unarmed students at Kent State University were shot and killed by Ohio National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970, while protesting a
gainst the bombing of Cambodia.
6 Ladywood was a Catholic girls’ school in Indianapolis.
7 “Nature red in tooth and claw” is a quote from John Milton’s poem “In Memoriam,” and refers to predatory animals baring their teeth and claws with the blood of the prey they killed.
8 Eastern Washington University, Spokane, Washington
9 The first Iraq War.
10 On Receiving the Carl Sandburg Award, Chicago, Illinois. (The Carl Sandburg Literary Award, given by the Chicago Public Library Foundation, “honors an author whose significant body of work has enhanced the public’s awareness of the written word.”)
11 The Carl Sandburg Literary Award.
12 Mrs. O’Leary’s cow is credited in folklore for kicking over a lantern in a barn and starting the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which was followed by large-scale reconstruction that led to new economic and population growth.
13 The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
14 The University of Chicago.
15 Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
16 Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana
If This Isn't Nice, What Is? Page 7