Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007): "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

When I was a teenager, Kurt Vonnegut powerfully impacted the way I grew to see the world. I carried around torn, reread copies of his books in my backpack. For me, with their bright, candy-colored covers, they were talismanic objects of the strength and power of Vonnegut's experience and vision that I toted to remind me to hold onto my own senses and way of seeing the world around me.

At that time, the mainstream American media stressed Japan's role in the world as an economic power, as if that made Japan "Number One." However, I was always convinced that the most important global role of Japanese people was as peace witnesses against nuclear weapons and war, and that to do this, they would have to grapple with the many painful dimensions of Japan's history during the Second World War. This was the historical mission appointed to Japan, in my view, and I looked under radar for evidence of this, and found insights in Vonnegut's writings. I was fascinated by how Kurt Vonnegut's life intersected with Japan's history more than one time. First, by precipitating his entry into World War II, and, secondly, by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which powerfully changed his consciousness along with the entire world's collective consciousness.

In 1943, after the Imperial Japanese government bombed Pearl Harbor, Kurt Vonnegut, then a student at Cornell University, joined the army. His father said, "Good. They will teach you to be neat." As a POW imprisoned in a meat locker basement under a slaughterhouse in Dresden, he was one of the few survivors of the Allied firebombings that annihilated the city.

Not surprisingly, he became one of the world's foremost anti-war writers.

His 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse Five: Or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, reflected his own experience in Dresden.

Cat's Cradle, written in 1963, was Vonnegut's satirical take on the banality of scientists who choose not to consider the ethical dimensions of their experiments and inventions; the stupidity of the arms race; and the ineffectual non-responses of those who choose to ignore the larger moral questions and challenges of our shared public life. The fictional narrator, Jonah, begins by recounting his researching a book that was to be a Christian-inspired account of what important Americans did on the day that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima:

Listen:

When I was a younger man — two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago. . .
When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called The Day the World Ended.
The book was to be factual.
The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.
I am a Bokononist now.
I would have been a Bokononist then, If there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon. But Bokononism was unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knives that ring this little island in the Caribbean Sea, the Republic of San Lorenzo.
We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended.

I followed Kurt Vonnegut's powerful, dry, ascerbic prophetic anti-war voice for the rest of his life. In this 2003 In These Times interview, "Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@" and 2004 "Cold Turkey," he focuses on the contours of the dark, greedy, destructive aspects of the human-made world, but at the same time shedding a faint, hopeful, brave light through repeating the words of his son, Mark, a pediatrician who finished medical school after recovery from a nervous breakdown:

“Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

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