Sometimes the daily onslaught of the horrific is so real that to survival calls for laughter. Andrew Lewis has this Perspective.
Growing up, we didn’t have much food in our house. That actually might be an overstatement. I recall once when my brother and I asked our mother (herself a war refugee from Europe) for food and she replied simply, “Go eat butter.”
But it’s rotten, we protested. And to that she had no reply.
For a long while after, my brother and I would mimic her in times of particular duress. “Go eat butter,” one of us would say, to which we would both break out in laughter.
Years later I was talking with a childhood friend whose father had survived wartime famine in the Ukraine in the 1940’s. “Pops once told a story,” he recounted, “of how when he was 12 he and the other kids had-” and here we both started chuckling- “He had to go dig for potatoes in a minefield.” Perhaps only the children of survivors could find this funny.