Anonymous,
St. Paul, MN.
“O’Hare had a little notebook with him, and printed in the back of it were postal rates and airline distances and the altitudes of famous mountains and other key facts about the world. He was looking up the population of Dresden, which wasn’t in the notebook, when he came across this which he gave me to read:
‘On an average day, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. During that same day, 10,000 persons, on an average, will have starved to death or died from malnutrition.’ So it goes. ‘In addition, 123,000 persons will die for other reasons.’ So it goes. ‘This leaves a net gain of about 191,000 each day in the world. The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world’s total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000.’
‘I suppose they will all want dignity,’ I said.
‘I suppose,’ said O’Hare.”
From the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
