So, I...uh...had a deal with spenke I was supposed to be knifing open the satsuma plum of my Vonnegut chastity belt with Breakfast of Champions. But, you know, patience hasn't been coded into my DNA, let alone cultivated as one of my virtues (sic). 
 In 1999, Kurt Vonnegut was asked to write an an epitaph for the 20th century. His response? 
 "I have written it: The good Earth -- we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy." 
 2 B R 0 2 B (RIP Shakespeare) is a flash fiction he wrote in 1962. Back in the good ol' days of closed, equilibrium state systems, Friedman economics, white male supremacy and the little lady at home, burgeoning consumerism as the slipslide into "utopia", and "Duck and Cover" as your friendly neighbourhood mantra in the event of a nuclear warhead coming to a cinema near you. 
 Vonnegut extrapolated into a future and you know, he wasn't too far wrong. It's not so much his vision that was imperfect, as the fact that physics had yet to pronounce to all and sundry that although the status quo is infinite and everywhere, like wave-particle duality when seen from the perspective of the observer it doesn't behave independently or even with necessary predictability. So what we have sixty years after Vonnegut's peek into our future is ineffective population control in the face of population growth, rather than the demand = supply steady state scenario of his story, and a continuation of resource appropriation enforced via an oligopoly of corporation-states, as opposed to the euphoric prosperity for all that is the corollary of that steady state. 
 "Everything was perfectly swell. 
 There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars. All diseases were conquered. So was old age. 
 Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers." 
 That's the opening scene. But Vonnegut doesn't go for the global perspective, he bats the ball straight into middle class suburbia and takes out a father obliged to choose which one of his three new born offspring will survive, since only his own father has offered to partake of euthanasia in order to maintain the balanced equation. 
 This is witnessed by the artist who is painting a garden mural - think Hieronymus Bosch' Garden of Earthly Delights and the ambiguity of what Bosch intended with his triptych - to be populated by the likenesses of the medical staff responsible for delivering life and simultaneously extinguishing it. The painter, two hundred years old, displays a callousness that indicates his contempt not just for the society in which he lives, but for the society which will follow him should he choose to commit suicide: "...express[ing] with an obscenity his lack of concern for the tribulations of his survivors." 
 In the aftermath of the means the father uses to resolve his state-imposed moral and emotional quandary, the painter "...ponder[s] the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be born and...fruitful...to multiply and to live as long as possible...on a very small planet that would have to last forever. All the answers...were grim." He reneges on his professed disdain and schedules himself to be euthanised, and is thus eulogised by the terminating staff: "Your city thanks you; your country thanks you; your planet thanks you. But the deepest thanks of all is from future generations." 
 It's not something we can expect from ours, given that we've been too damn insular and apathetic.