320 Years of History
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- #61
you understand both worlds
I think I do, and I think that because I have grown to see I have been blessed in the few ways that one need be to see both worlds.
- I was born a white boy in an "old money" family.
- The people with whom I lived and who, in addition to my parents, most heavily influenced my childhood were the black women who worked in my parents' home. Occasionally I went to their homes and saw how they lived. Occasionally I listened to them discussing the "state things" as they saw them. I didn't, as a child, fully understand all or most of the factors in play, but I didn't forget about them as I grew older and learned more.
- As a teen and young adult, I observed the challenges (some social, some economic) faced by folks who weren't from the same background as I, but who were just as capable as I. I have seen them face those challenges and thrive just as I have, yet I didn't face those challenges. By all "common sense" reasoning, I should be "ahead" of them, yet I'm not; they and I are both highly successful socially and economically. Yet they clearly had to "do more" to achieve the same things (relatively more or less) as I.
- I chose to develop a career of my own instead of being groomed to take the reigns of my family's business. That angered my father, but I'm very happy with the choice I made for I did what I wanted to do and I did what I needed to do to be successful at it. Daddy figured out a way to keep the company going so that it'd be there for his grandkids to take on, and it looks like one of my kids wants to do just that.
- From my ~30th year on, I committed to helping a few kids each year who were from "challenging" backgrounds. My goal was merely to do what I could to help them at least not by their own and their parent's pardonable ignorance fall prey to the circumstances in which they had no choice but dwell. That has continued to the present. Over the course of those years, it's become clear to me that it's not about from where one comes or where one is, it's about what one does to move on to another place of one's choosing.
I get it. Given the nature of "the way things work" now, some folks will have an easier road to travel. I don't think that's right or fair, and I would like to see that change to afford all or most folks equally curvy, inclined or declined roads to travel, at least as far as society can by its collective will make that be so. If/when that happens, it may me my own children have to work harder to achieve what I have achieved. That's okay. I've prepared them to be able to work harder, so I expect they will if they want to achieve as I have.
People say "such and such" is hard. Well, they are right, it is. Truly, I didn't have "easy" to offer my mentorees or most anyone else. Not everyone can be born into the circumstance I and my children were. I wish everyone could be, but for now, they cannot. One can certainly bemoan one's situation or former situation or one can do something to get out of it and not put one's kids into it. "Doing something about it" means one must make the most of what they have, however meager that "something" be, just like Mr. Gilbert from the OP's video. The fact that "doing something" with the barest of beginnings is capable of resulting in "greatness" -- something that is infinitely harder to do pretty much everywhere else -- is what makes America the greatest country on Earth.
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