Requirements To Become A Pillar Of Salt

There is always a moment of surrender in a human being. There is a necessity to look at what has been done and what is to come. It is an obligation of every human being to surrender to absurd, unfair, insane realities either lived or shared vicariously and learn how to leave behind the painful past. We can vividly see this through the words of Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. “The Second World War had certainly made everybody very tough.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 4) As the narrator answers Nancy, the writer of a story he was reporting for Chicago City News Bureau, that he has seen “lots worse than that” of a case of a man that got trapped with an elevator door while he was inside his car getting smashed with the roof, we can see how horrendous war is for veterans. Not being able to talk to somebody leads people who have lived untold horrors for others security to take refuge in alcohol or suicide or become part of the living dead. I remember a tragedy that occurred here in Bogota many years ago where a man, who was a Vietnam/Korean vet, walked into a busy Italian restaurant, owned by some friends and proceeded to shoot at everybody and then committed suicide. It was not enough to have suffered war but be changed forever, become mentally ill and push yourself and others to an unimaginable horror and to an early grave.

As I studied the Holocaust in 7th grade English with Mrs. Leonard, something that caught my attention because I didn’t understand how it could be possible, was the idea that a group of modern people thought and persuaded others to believe that the Holocaust didn’t exist. It is offending and unconscious to even think of using your time to influence other people to believe that something of that level of horror and ignorance never happened. There is plenty of media, physical proof and survivors of the Holocaust, who amazingly continue fighting in a peaceful and conscious way, something not many could even dream of doing. “The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 4) These people Vonnegut talks about are those human beings we see and we hear about that amaze us into seeing how extremely brave and inspiring we humans can be. The lives and qualities of superior human beings such as Buda, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oscar Arias Sanchez and Jesus are universally inspiring.

In the last lines of Chapter 1, we see how the veteran’s voice is swallowed by overwhelming grief and sorrow and how the stories he recounts apply to himself, an alcoholic repressed being that has no one to talk to. He did as Job’s woman did and looked back at what he had seen, done and lived, becoming a pillar of salt, and a conscious one at that. “People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 8) What takes us to look back is a factor, in my opinion of the very nature of the human being, who is in a way possessed to look back, to understand, to think, to learn, obsess and to grieve. We constantly risk becoming frozen by our past by moving it into the present with all that old, dead luggage leaving little room for a fresh, vibrant and hopeful present and future. Instead of learning from all our pasts with a huge grain of salt, wisdom and humor in our pockets, we risk becoming a dead pillar of infertile salt.