Parental Utilization

"Rabo Karabekian asked Bonnie MacMahon to tell him something about the teen-age girl on the cover of the program for the Festival of the Arts. This was the only internationally famous human being in Midland City. She was Mary Alice Miller, the Women's Two Hundred Meter Breast Stroke Champion of the World. She was only fifteen, said Bonnie.

"Mary Alice was also the Queen of the Festival of the Arts. The cover of the program showed her in a white bathing suit, with her Olympic Gold Medal hanging around her neck...

"And Bonnie MacMahon told Beatrice and Karabekian that Mary Alice's father, who was a member of the parole board out at Shepherdstown, had taught Mary Alice to swim when she was eight months old, and that he had made her swim at least four hours a day, every day, since she was three.

"Rabo Karabekian thought this over, then he said loudly, so a lot of people could hear him, 'What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?'"

--Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions (1973).

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. And The Works Of Mercy: Quotations

"It has been said many times that man's knowledge of himself has been left far behind by his understanding of technology, and that we can have peace and plenty and justice only when man's knowledge of himself catches up. This is not true. Some people hope for great discoveries in the social sciences, social equivalents of F=ma and E=mc2, and so on. Others think we have to evolve, to become better monkeys with bigger brains. We don't need more information. We don't need better brains. All that is required is that we become less selfish than we are.

"We already have plenty of sound suggestions as to how we are to act if things are to become better on earth. For instance: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. About seven hundred years ago, Thomas Aquinas had some other recommendations as to what people might do with their lives, and i do not find these made ridiculous by computers and trips to the moon and television sets. He praises the Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy, which are these:

"To teach the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to console the sad, to reprove the sinner, to forgive the offender, to bear with the oppressive and troublesome, and to pray for us all.

"He also admires the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, which are these:

"To feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to visit the sick and prisoners, to ransom captives, and to bury the dead.

"A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly the lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness.

"Science has nothing to do with it, friends."

--from "Address to Graduating Class at Bennington College, 1970," from Wampeters Foma and Granfalloons, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.