Kindness: a great loss

After reading this wonderful post from Doc Searls yesterday, I was already thinking about Kurt Vonnegut before I heard he'd died.

It seems I never got around to reading most of Vonnegut's books, but I loved what he wrote and followed his essays and magazine writings, quoted him here at least a couple of times. One collection of essays recently published was A Man Without a Country, where Vonnegut said:

“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.’ ”

Today's New York Times obituary also uses the quote.

Doc notes the coincidence.

We need kindness so badly these days. The ones who were raised believing in it are dying off.

The antithesis of kindness: the views satirized in this cartoon, in the Village Voice: Elizabeth Edwards: Right Wing Conspiracy Theories.