As the Serenity Prayer quoted in the novel says, “God grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change, courage to change what I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference”. As a soldier in the fire-bombing of Dresden, Vonnegut saw first-hand the barbarism that warfare can perpetrate on innocent people. His purpose in writing the novel was to inform people that, although they are powerless to affect the past, they must wield the wisdom and courage to make changes to the future, the elimination of warfare being chief among those improvements to society. Slaughterhouse-Five made people think when it was published during the Vietnam War, and it remains a powerful reminder in today’s troubled times.  

When I hear the words, “Give me Liberty, or give me Death,” I no longer think of the American Revolution. My thoughts snap to the Arab Spring, a succession of Middle Eastern revolutionary events that have erupted within the last year. Like many Americans, I had an unfavorable initial reaction to the revolts in Egypt, Libya, and other nations. I saw these mutinies as nothing more than the rag-tag struggles that had plagued the Arab world for decades, and I believed that they would soon fade into the ether, returning to the unenviable status quo. I could not fathom that these Arab “Tea Parties” could lead to the overthrow of entrenched, immovable tyrannies.
I believe that we can draw an apt comparison between our reaction to the Arab peoples’ struggles and the world’s response to early American struggles. Our nonchalance to the events in the Middle East is not different from the indifference many Europeans showed towards the founding of the United States. Imagine that we are sitting at afternoon tea in a late-eighteenth century European household. We have heard of the insurrections occurring in the American colonies, yet we cast them aside as nothing more than the commotion of disgruntled colonists. We would never conceive that the revolts abroad would someday change the fundamental constitution of France, Britain, Spain, and dozens of other European neighbors. Our American response to the Arab Spring is a facsimile of eighteenth-century Europeans’ reaction to the American Revolution. Like many, I saw the revolutions in Egypt as faraway things that would never directly affect me. I even made the erroneous connection between the people fighting in the name of freedom and those waging violence in the name of terror. The people behind these revolutions are the modern-day equivalents of Paul Revere and Betsy Ross. They are ordinary people who chose to stand up for liberty when nobody else would.
The more I learned about the Arab Spring, the more I realized that American Founding Fathers such as Washington and Jefferson would have recognized elements of their own struggle recast in the fire of the Egyptian, Tunisian, and Libyan uprisings. If they saw government soldiers marching down the streets in guns, they would recognize British redcoats with muskets. 