Why has genius, as of late, chosen to take the form of mustachioed men with happy faces and big noses? For reference, I present two geniuses:

(Albert Einstein – Developed Theory of Relativity and relatively bombed Japan)

(Kurt Vonnegut – Brilliant anti-war writer and World War Two participant)

It’s spring break around my part of the world, so I’ve been trying to keep as unproductive as possible. That means I’ve been doing a lot of reading and bed-sulking.

One of the books I’ve been sulk-reading is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. I avoided this book for years because the title made it sound like a miserable, depression-inducing war novel. Imagine my delight when I finally cracked open my copy and found it was actually a hilarious, depression-inducing war novel.

The first chapter is very different than the rest of the novel, and is really just Kurt Vonnegut reflecting on the story he’s about to tell. One reflection is about a man who told Vonnegut he’d be just as well writing an anti-glacier novel as an anti-war novel.

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.

The one thing Vonnegut didn’t count on when he wrote this in the 1960s was a little thing called global warming.

In the same way Einstein turned his bomb idea into cool science and Vonnegut turned his war participation into anti-war novels, I wonder if we can turn our melting glaciers into peaceful coexistence.

~Fin