Friday, July 24
Welcome to Earth
I was looking though my copy of Free To Be... You and Me today. It’s a great book published in 1974, filled with poems stories, pictures, and songs. They all have messages about challenging stereotypes and not being sexist, racist, mean, etc. It was meant as a “new kind of children's book”, and though it may sound dumb, it’s actually quite good (at least in my opinion). At the back of the book, there’s an afterword written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I’m sure I’ve seen it before, but this time it caught my eye and I took the time to read it. I’m disappointed that we’ll never get to read Welcome to Earth.
“I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don’t fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn’t explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I’d tell them how we reproduce, how long we’ve boon here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. And one thing I would really like to tell them about is cultural relativity. I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.”
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