kate and janelle - star witness by neko case
You occupy the top of the food chain because you were born in the United States. Imagine that you were born in sub-Saharan Africa: if you weren’t dead by now, you’d still spend the majority of your days looking for clean water. Just as Bill Gates, or Sarah Palin, or Donald Trump would if they had been born there.
Instead of fending for yourself, you get to benefit from the generations before you who built the roads, and the sewers, and the water treatment plants, and the schools to graduate the engineers who designed and built them, and even the lowly burger flippers who paid in to the same till to make sure the government had funding. You are the end result of countless burger flippers, teachers, seamstresses, sanitation workers, fisherman, farmers; all who would gladly call you a citizen, happy that you had the opportunities that they perhaps did not. (In the 30s they would have called you brother or sister, perhaps until they got to know you.)
What I’m saying is that you are not special. You are lucky. And you owe your life to everyone in your society who came before you, not to yourself. You owe your life to burger flippers.
In return for this opportunity, your society asks you to contribute to a progressive tax system that ensures the next generation of the society has the same opportunities you were lucky enough to have. (If you happen to begin making loads of money, your burden may seem high, until you realize that your fortune would not be possible without the infrastructure your country gave you.) We also ask that you be respectful of everyone’s job, because without everyone, your doctor wouldn’t be giving anyone breakthrough heart surgery. He’d be looking for water.
There will always be new things, built on a mountain of history.
We will never, ever, in all our history and with all our ambition, be able to exhaust the potential of what we love to claim are simple bodies and simple minds. In all the universe, we will always be capable of amazing feats, right until we die.
It’s just so easy to believe otherwise, so we’re often caught off-guard when something breaks that gloomy, self-fulfilling trance, and so we react like the mammals we are, facing up to something monstrous that rears up out of nowhere.
But that’s impossible—
—and the waves come, neurons firing fusillades forward through all the boundless millennia between, pulling at the fine old strings and stretching the sinews, bringing that instant, that echoing reflection of glory when we’re here, right here, right now, and awake.
There’s still so much more to see.
lately, I’ve been trying (and mostly failing) to explain to a good friend why I’m wary of “spark”, but this absolutely nails it.
