I have been reading through Armageddon in Retrospect, a book containing twelve pieces by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., which were unpublished during his lifetime. They are mainly satirical pieces about the folly of war, and sadly, the all too often folly of life.

Vonnegut, a member of a prominent Indianapolis family, did not appear to write about Israel, although he lived until 2007. He was not Jewish by religion but would fit right into the Jewish world by his attitude towards things and he was married to a prominent Jewish writer, Jill Krementz, for 30 years.

Of course, he wrote about World War II in Slaughterhouse Five, and elsewhere, based on his experience in that war as a German POW, who by chance survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945, shortly before the war ended in Europe.

In Armageddon, compiled and edited by his son, you can read the letter Vonnegut sent to his parents from France after he was evacuated from Germany, and while he was waiting for a berth on a naval ship to come home. His letter, proving that fact and fiction can be much too close to each other, displays what will become one of his hallmarks, his more than skeptical attitude towards war.

I don’t think that it was Vonnegut who coined the thought, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”, but he could have. To him, the destruction of Dresden was inexcusably cruel and unnecessary, destroying a beautiful, and civilian, city of culture, and murdering tens of thousands of Germans caught in a war, but not fighting the war, and just trying to maintain their lives. As a witness to this destruction and to its aftermath, he was appalled.

What would he have thought of Gaza, where the Israeli ground offensive is apparently beginning today?

What would he have said about the loss of life and property, and about the cruelty being shown survivors? What would he have said about the possibility that this exercise will even begin to achieve two of its goals – the release of hostages and destruction of Hamas? You can imagine what he would have made of Netanyahu’s comment that Israel would have to become a Sparta. Remind me – how did things turn out for Sparta?

I know a large number of Israelis. Some live there. Some live here. All are horrified by the actions of their government and are shocked that even though they live in a “democracy”, it turns out they are powerless. And that they are so deeply tarred internationally, as individuals and as a community, by actions they abhor.

The United States has, over my adult lifetime, caused more than enough wrong-headed damage to other parts of the world. It has also spent dollars and energy trying to stabilize lands far and near, and for this, it is rightly praised. A mixed bag.

But we are now having our own existential crisis connected to our own imperfect form of democracy. We are in a period of great instability, our basic, constitutional freedoms imperiled. We sit by while wars are waged around the world, and we spend what little energy we seem to have bombing little Venezuelan boats on the high seas. What kind of superpower does that?

In the meantime, free speech is threatened by the apparently random killing of Charlie Kirk by a random young man.

I have a question for Mr. Trump. Was the life of Charlie Kirk more precious than the life of any one of the 14 Venezuelans whose deaths you ordered on those little boats on the high seas? Depending on how you answer that question, Mr. President, I will have several more.

I await your response.