I wrote the Air Force back then, asking for details about the raid on Dresden, who ordered it, how many planes did it, what desirable results they had been and so on. I was answered by a man who, like myself, was in public relations. He said that he was sorry, but that the information was top secret still. I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, 'Secret? My God--from whom?'
If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. 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.
I congratulated him on what he'd said on his way to be hanged before a gleeful, jeering throng of white folks. I quote: 'This is a beautiful country.' In only five words, he had somehow encapsulated the full horror of the most hideous legal atrocities committed by a civilized nation until the Holocaust.
Jesus said how awful life was, in the Sermon on the Mount: 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and 'Blessed are the meek,' and 'Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.'
Henry David Thoreau said most famously, 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.'
So it is not one whit mysterious that we poison the water and air and topsoil, and construct ever more cunning doomsday devices, both industrial and military. Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can't come soon enough.
