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We spend hours in trivial pursuit and too little time on meaningful issues. At a time when 47 million Americans are on food stamps, 10.4 million people are unemployed, our nation’s debt has been growing exponentially and stateless terrorists are stalking people around the globe, we are fixated on ensuring that the Little Sisters of the Poor can receive morning after pills, folks in Colorado can smoke marijuana and those in New York cannot sip 20 ounce soft drinks. We worry about issues over which we have little control, like spotted owls and polar icecaps, while ignoring complex issues like understanding what it means, in a civil society, to live freely, under the rule of law. We want to please everyone and, consequently, too often please no one. Leaders in politics and the media concentrate on issues that divide us, rather than on those that unite us.
At the same time, we forget how insignificant we are and how large the world is. And we pay too little attention to the remarkable chain of events that had to occur in order that we might be here. The mathematical odds against any one of us being born are overwhelming. We are lucky to live in this age and even more fortunate to live in a free country.
Every person is unique, yet we all come from the same place – out of Africa. While no one knows how many left Africa and over what time periods, the consensus believes our ancestors left in waves, beginning more than 60,000 years ago. From those common ancestors was born the human race, as we know it. Given an average life span of eighty or so years, 60,000 years is a long time, but for an earth that is 4.5 billion years old, 60,000 years barely registers.
Ancestry is fascinating and history is more meaningful when we associate it with a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent. For example, President William Howard Taft is not widely remembered, but was President when my father was born in 1910. Ulysses Grant was President in 1873 when my paternal grandfather was born and Martin Van Buren was President at his father’s birth, in 1837, just over a hundred years before my own birth.