so it goes

The anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing is a good day to remember Kurt Vonnegut, whose first-hand experience of the fire-bombing of Dresden shaped his worldview and his fiction. Kindness is still in short supply.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”