There has been a lot of talk recently of the morality of the United States, especially concerning homosexuality and racism. As a country largely founded on Christian ideals, we believe in a moral duality. Heaven vs. hell, Christian vs. Islam, gay vs. straight. The list could go on, but when you hold this mold up to the reality of the human condition you really that it doesn’t fit. In real life, there are many different molds. I realize that there are people who will never get along and that writing this article will do little to bridge the gaps in humanity. That being said, I think that we should stop finding reasons to be divided.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s "Cat’s Cradle," he discusses how people decide to group themselves in society. He uses his religion that he invented, Bokononism, to discuss these ideas. The Bokononist bible is a compilation of the poetry of Bokonon. The central idea of Bokononism is predestination. It leads Vonnegut to talk about the ways people decide to split within society. The people who will play a central role in the drama of your life are people in what Bokonon calls your Karass. However, he discusses groups of people that he calls your false-Karass. “This is what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of Granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows -- and any nation, anytime, anywhere.” Then he ends the chapter with a poem that goes, “If you wish to study a Granfalloon / Just remove the skin of a toy balloon," obviously leaving you with the impression that these groups are empty human inventions. And while they do bring us together in a sense, they also do a great job of creating rigid boundaries that, once created, are very hard to overlook.

While I wouldn’t call myself a Bokononist, you can’t say that there isn't logic in what Vonnegut is saying. We could choose to realize that there are different people out there and decide to coexist, but a lot of people don’t. They want to cling to their narrow beliefs of what they believe humanity is or at least what they believe it should be. Another group that I would say is a Granfalloon is generations. It leads a lot of people to be ignorant of what it means to be human simply because they are from a different meaningless group, and most people think that their generation was special. They were the golden generation. When they were young, life was silk sheets and warm fires on cold nights. But what’s changed isn’t the “kids these days” but the situation kids are born into today. The people who say things like, “When I was a kid, we could leave our doors unlocked when we left the house,” were exactly that, kids. They were so enveloped in their naivete they were unaware of how life works. When they heard about groups like Al Qaeda they didn’t flinch. They didn’t think Islam. They didn’t think racism. For most, life at its worst was a scraped knee. That’s not to say that these people didn’t have a good childhood or that they shouldn’t nostalgically look back and smile. But to expect out of the currently youngest generation what was expected of them or to say that they should do something because that’s the way things were when they were young is unreasonable. They talk about generations like this one is different, but the thing about humans is that we have always made our parents mad, in one way or another, and we probably always will.

All that this talk of generations does is divide humanity when we’re already largely divided by race, gender, sexuality or religion. In the end, we’re all one humanity. I believe that we should do our best to understand and love each other the best that we can because we have one shot at this life. It makes little sense to not at least try and make it as happy a life that we can.