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Kurt Vonnegut On American Poverty
Are we facing more dark times ahead as the rich stay safe while the middle class is wiped out?
When I was in high school, I read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I honestly don’t remember much about it. There were other authors that had more of an impact on me. I do remember the dark humor in the novel along with a collection of short stories that he authored, Welcome to the Monkey House.
Vonnegut was born in 1922 and was a child during the Great Depression. He also volunteered to serve in WWII and was shipped to Germany where he was captured and at one point imprisoned in a slaughterhouse.
These events influenced him.
I recently read two quotes by him. The first seems to describe not only the excesses and abuses of the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, but also the modern financial excesses of the 1990s and the last few years. In these periods, the divide between the rich and the poor grew. As Vonnegut wrote:
Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be…
