Kurt Vonnegut has died. We have lost another one who hoped.

These days, I am living as the philosophical equivalent to a dodo bird. Exultant in my stupidity, I have forgotten all about hope. The reason to do what I do best--write poorly. Many times, I have harkened back to the dreadfully accurate words of Allen Ginsberg:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix
-Howl

While Ginsberg wrote for the beat generation, his words apply to this maddening generation of post post X'ers. We have bypassed heroin for something better, something more applicable, something safer--apathy. The Boomers were the parasitic joy of the twentieth century. They sucked their hosts dry, and left the land and people dark and hopeless. Instead, we crave technology to support our hollow souls, and have forgotten the truth of the world. We are starving, Allen. We are hysterical. And we are naked and vulnerable to what comes next.

Unlike me, there are those who have decided entropy is absolutely dawning on us, and they have decided not to hope. I do not chastise them, for they have the courage to think everyday that all is past salvation. And they persist. It is a conversation between an athiest and her world. She is truly able to forsake a faith made of cotton candy wisps, and decides to embrace the void of God. She is Without. Many of my contemporaries have grasped this, and continue to live and work and play.

But then, there are us. The hopers.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
-Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut and his satire displays such hope for the world, that in amongst the most dreadful atomic wars and most conflicted and insane individuals, there is a morsel of hope for humanity. All over, these hopers keep lifting their minds up and impart to the world what it means to dwell Within. I could list them: Socrates, Plato, Julius, Alexander, Jesus, Buddha, Hamilton, Jefferson, Luther, King, Parks, St. Theresa, Ghandi,Arvo Part, Vonnegut, Rahner, Kant...but you know these and many, many more.