On luck and our responsibility to others:
As is customary, any posting after midnight is bound to be silly, sappy or incredibly verbose. If you’d like to roll your eyes in advance of my super-earnest wall-o-textTM about humility and being a responsible adult, please do! Look away now, ye cynics. :D
I was struck, as I frequently am, with the enormity of my luck in becoming who I am today.
I have a dedicated mother who kept us off welfare through blind determination. I have a family that has supported me at all times, and challenged me to think for myself as a child.
I’ve accumulated incredible friends who have insisted on helping me in my times of need – financially, physically, emotionally. I’ve somehow kept out of serious trouble or disability, despite a dozen circumstances I can think of where I could have really paid dearly.
I am intelligent, and I’ve had ample lessons in how to make my way in the world.
I have a job that gives me the agency to make important decisions, that allows me to be creative, that gives me a chance to teach others. I can afford to live alone in a fashion many would call comfortable, in debt from school but otherwise quite happy.
I have contributed to some of these circumstances, yes, but many of my fortunes come from no virtue of my own.
So I feel a debt (a happy debt) to both the individuals who have my back, and to society as a whole. Tragic, brutal and unforgiving as it often is, it allows me to live very, very easy.
I think I have a duty to remember that those of us fortunate enough to have homes and internet connections and fully fueled cars stand on the shoulders of not just our friends and neighbors, but on the shoulders of people who don’t even like us. Like Social Security, all of our ancestors worked hard to put us in the circumstances we are in (not just our parents, our kin, our social group), and we owe it to our society to contribute in turn, whether we have children to take advantage of that or not.
I believe that means volunteering of yourself to others. Paying your effing taxes like an adult. A sense of humility over hubris. And some goddamned empathy for people who are in the hole, who maybe have always been in the hole, with no way to pull themselves out.
That could have been me – it could still be me, if circumstances change.
Don’t get me wrong – I would not give up my advantages; I intend to make the most of my life.
That said, may an intervention be staged on the day I truly believe that I somehow deserve all of the advantages I have been given. May I be ridiculed if I ever proudly think I have a right to live in the comfort and security (as it is) that I do now.
“Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.” – Seneca, ~40AD
Oh, this is SO ganked and promulgated.
Something I didn’t really know how to express in the original post, and was concerned would come out wrong:
Some of our ancestors lifted our society up against their will. Not only am I living comfortably off the backs of immigrants who came to make a life for themselves, but of hundreds of thousands of slaves who, well, slaved and died, ultimately improving our GDP and the station of all those who came after… including, eventually, their own ancestors. I, and we, are riding high on the profit spread around our country from the war machines of World War I and II, and perhaps the Iraq War.
I don’t think about that all the time – it’s just the circumstances we were born into – but it is nonetheless true. I’m not comfortable with it, but it is well beyond my control, except for this: If people died and that ultimately makes my life more easy, or opens more doors for me, it would be doubly shameful for me not to pay it forward, and triply shameful for me to outright waste it.
Awesome. I’ll come to your intervention if you’ll come to mine!
>>>Paying your effing taxes like an adult.
YEAH. Even if it hurts.