Just a note before I begin. I have been seeing hundreds of hits per day to my blog from Singapore for about 2 weeks, although that interest has begun to wain since yesterday. Overall, there have been over 4000 hits this month with the vast majority from Singapore. I would be interested in any comments from my new readers, and perhaps even how and why this interest has occurred.
In 2010 when I first started this blog, one of my first posts concerned my thoughts on the randomness of life, when, where, to whom we are born, and the fact that not enough thought is given to the idea that whether we have won or lost the birth lottery greatly effects the path of our lives. Here is a link to that post.
https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2010/04/birth-lottery.html
At the time, and for the first few years after I posted it, if you googled birth lottery, my post was displayed on the first page of results which translated to a slew of hits. Now, as more and more people have presented their take on this concept, it is more difficult to find my post without accessing it directly through the blog.
In 2013, I created a second post on this topic, link below. It received a lot less hits than the first, but after reading both I like the second one a bit more, especially the last paragraph.
https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-birth-lottery-revisited.html
Yesterday I read an article in the May edition of The National Geographic concerning the forced removal of Indigenous children from their homes. Of course, I was aware of this atrocity, the concept that taking these children from their homes, their culture, was not only acceptable, but necessary to make them less barbaric, more christian, more westernized, etc, but I guess it never dawned on me that this practice continued into the 20th century.
I guess I thought it was a prejudice from the 19th century, never having pursued, or never being taught in detail, just how long this horrific practice existed.
What struck me is that many of the children, now adults, who were featured in the article were born in the late 50's and 60's, the same time frame as me and a few of my siblings.
In other words, if I had lost the birth lottery and been born on an American Indian reservation, I would have been deemed in need of civilizing. I would have been forcibly removed from my home, forbidden to speak my native tongue, dressed in strange clothes, and denied knowledge of my culture. As would at least a few of my brothers.
Conversely, those children profiled in those pages would have experienced a much happier childhood, loved within their birth family structure, not requiring indoctrination, not subjected to the abuse and loneliness that this forced removal created had they been born in the circumstances that I was.
All due to the vagaries of the birth lottery.
According to the article, "there were about 500 federally funded boarding schools for Native children opened in the US and Canada beginning in the 1800's. Most focused on religious conversion, often through forced labor and brutal punishment." Yea, nothing inspires religious conversion like slave labor and beatings.
And sometimes, these children were sent thousands of miles from their homes. It is well known that Jim Thorpe's incredible athletic talents became known due to his attendance at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Usually when people discuss this fact, they fail to mention that he was born in Oklahoma, a member of the Sac and Fox Indian Tribe, which means he was sent about 1300 miles from his family for this forced schooling.
While Thorpe may have lost the birth lottery in terms of his ethnicity, he won in terms of athletic ability, some calling him the greatest athlete of his time, possibly of the 20th century. Sadly, there are not many other stories of forced removal and schooling of Indigenous children that have any such positive results. And, even Thorpe, who won Olympic gold medals, was a successful professional baseball and football player, and has one of the major awards of pro football named for him, has been ill treated in death due to his heritage.
Is it possible to overcome the obstacles that losing the birth lottery can present? That is, in fact, the source of so many inspiring stories of human accomplishment, not just your rags to riches type stories, but those who succeed despite physical and mental handicaps, missing parents, or worse, abusive upbringings.
Birth lottery discussions, and the recognition that winning or losing the birth lottery is a significant factor in the ultimate success or happiness of an individual, does not eliminate the need to do one's best, to make the most of whatever advantages the birth lottery has presented, to strive with every fiber in your body to overcome whatever disadvantages which resulted from losing the birth lottery.
But failing to recognize the advantages gained by simply being born to loving parents, in a prosperous country, with good health and/or above average intelligence, seems a bit arrogant, at best, an insult to the creator, at worst, for denying that so much of what you have is the result of random luck, or due to a favorable cosmic dart throw.
Wouldn't it be interesting if on judgement day we were judged by what we did with what we received at birth? Or what we did to help those who were blessed with less at birth? Or simply whether we were humble in acknowledging our accomplishments and magnanimous towards those who sometimes fell short of achieving theirs?
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