I am a fortunate man. And if I’m honest, I’m forced to conclude something a friend told me over 20 years ago: “You’re like a cat, man. You always land on your feet.” He was referring to my ability to trip, fall, and somehow manage to never break a bone. True both literally and figuratively, this only proves I am as clumsy as I am lucky. I had to be – my astigmatism was so severe at five years old that I would regularly walk into door frames when entering a bedroom. I earned my first lifelong scar (on the bottom of my chin) when I was six and tumbled off the back steps of our house in New Hampshire. That was the same year I jumped from a rock in the meadow behind that house – directly onto a huge hornet’s nest. It was a 400 yard screaming sprint from that spot to my house. My next door neighbor corralled me, lifting up my shirt with one hand while spraying me with a can of raid in the other. He was stung at least 30 times. I easily outnumbered that times ten. I’m very lucky I wasn’t allergic. I wore glasses by then and one of my most vivid memories is having so many hornets crawling over the lenses that I couldn’t see where I was going and so flung them from my face as I was racing away. It wouldn’t be the last excuse I had for losing my glasses but it was by far the best. My second lifelong scar was from the appendectomy I underwent a year later. I woke up from surgery and spent the next week in the hospital (this was the early 70’s, everyone stayed in the hospital longer then) eating ice cream next to a two foot stack of comic books. Pure heaven.
I don’t want to be all Carl Sagan (reason be upon him) here but I think it’s worth mentioning how insanely lucky we are to exist at all. Study some basic cosmology, or hell, even just astronomy, throw in some middle school level biology and it isn’t hard to be gobsmacked by the odds all of us beat – me in order to sit here and be writing this, you in sitting (or standing, I don’t judge) there reading it. It’s one of those profound truths that once learned, runs the risk of the descending spiral: from profound truth, to proverb, to cliché (we are all stardust). Or at best, it’s something one can manage a nostalgic smile for, the sort you wear when hearing it occur for the first time to a circle of stoned philosophy students. But like all profound truths, it bears repeating, and repeating, and repeating.
I’m lucky. I am a white man born in America during the middle of the 1960’s. This statement means I’ve been the recipient of gifts both earned and stolen since the day of that birth. I grew up in an environment that had by some estimates 60% more wild species than we have today. My childhood described a kind of freedom that no child enjoys today – not just the freedom derived from my whereabouts being unknowable but freedom from the fear of being shot in school. On the other hand, today’s child has powers at their fingertips I could not dream of. Dewey decimal system? Anyone? Anyone?
I’ve lived through the transition of the analog to the digital. From the space age (initial, tentative, but fantastic) to the information age (ditto). Given the ever increasing rate of change, I expect I’ll see a good portion of the next age as well. If the next age is to biology what the current one is to computing, we all may live to see a great deal of it. Provided we don’t kill ourselves and everything more complex than bacteria. This fortune, both in the place and time of my birth, is very important. It means I was born in the wealthiest place on Earth during the height of that society’s power, as part of that society’s ruling racial heirarchy, a society that also happens to be the mightiest in human history. Now, someone born in Rome 2000 years ago was also able to make that claim, as was each successive empire that took that spot since. What makes our time different is, for the first time, the real possibility that there won’t be a next. Not just a next empire, any next at all. You could say to yourself, well that’s not lucky. That is downright terrifying. The truth is it is both.
What a fucking time to be alive. We’ve got an existential threat bearing down on us that makes nuclear weapons seem quaint while also struggling with those resurgent demons of humanity some thought squarely vanquished. Wise people recognize those demons only require the necessary conditions and the right words of summoning for them to come howling back. Or the deeper truth, they never really got vanquished at all – they just traded one set of clothes for another, and waited. I’m lucky that this particular evil is so blatant, so forthright and frank, that anyone who takes the slightest bother to engage cannot call it for anything than what it is: an attempt to let the worst demons of human nature burn everything to ash. When things get that black and white, there is no grey to hide in. I use words with religious connotations on purpose; not because I believe in demons or evil of the biblical sort, but because I believe in demons of the human sort perpetrating all too human evil. We don’t need eschatological devils of the religious variety when we’re quite capable of producing eschatological devils of the merely human variety. In an age where too many people believe in angels rather than in evolution, the use of religious language needs to be appropriated and used as a bridge to bring the religious in.
I’m lucky one of the gifts of my birth in both time and place is that great treasure known as the Western Tradition. It’s fashionable nowadays to kick that tradition while it is down but I am unconcerned inasmuch as all traditions need a good kicking from time to time. The western tradition has much one can criticize about it – despite its ideals it has managed to fail a great many people who find themselves in it. This is both undeniable and I would argue a price we all pay along that path as the price of progress. This is neither an abdication of responsibility for past injustices nor as an excuse in continuing to turn a blind uncaring eye. However, the failure lies in our society and the way we go about education not the best ideals we’ve discovered so far. Those ideals are built on the best that human minds have reasoned, painstakingly reasoned through millenia of blood, suffering, and sacrifice. Powerful in both sentiment and application, it is the reason the best part of America has been so good for so many. We just have to resist that all too human tendency, summed up by the unofficial but operating motto of the modern conservative and or libertarian: “I got mine, you can go fuck yourself.”
I’m fortunate in the life I find myself living. My spouse’s profession is one of those few that finds itself in the sweet spot of a Venn diagram consisting of the spheres lucrative, respected, and noble. It is because of this that I find myself living the life that matches most closely my inherent tendencies. I tend to avoid crowds, although I love to watch them go by. Most of the day to day annoyances and stress that most of my fellow citizens, including my spouse have to endure: I find myself mostly free. I have time to myself. Time I never find boring. I like people. I like them even more when the choice of interaction is largely up to me. If I am honest, and as I get older the value of honesty only becomes more apparent, I admit I love humanity as a species and I desperately care about our survival as well as the conditions survival takes place in. That said… we’re exhausting. Disappointing. Frustrating. Sometimes dangerous. When I see what is happening to the rest of the life on this planet, I am tempted towards misanthropy. I made the conscious decision to love us all anyway. Because we’re worth it. It’s a decision I find myself lucky for the opportunity to make.