Zygote This, Your Highness!

Dear Children:

In The Declaration of Independence, Mr. Jefferson and the other rebel leaders held that individual persons had an inalienable right to life. That doesn’t sound very radical to us. We have a right to live and that’s that. That’s right.

It wasn’t so settled a principle as the eighteenth century drew to a close. The Sovereign on the one hand or The Mob on the other had all the rights over life.

The Founders seized the immodest idea that government could not deprive anyone of life capriciously. From the beginnings of civilization, governments treated life as an asset to be exploited for its own purposes as one would the water in a lake or clay in the earth. In the case of a kingdom, the ruler could sign a warrant for anyone’s death on his own authority. In other cultures, any gang of pitchfork-wielding vigilantes could have your head.

We’re still working out what this means in fine slices. Be that as it may, the idea that government cannot willy-nilly take life only began to be codified for ordinary people with the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to our Constitution. That codification required something called due process of law. As big a deal as this was and is nothing in these principles guarantees life.

Your life is a result of a freakishly random set of circumstances that began when the first set of human parents produced children. Lucy Hominid met Dezi Australopithecus in the Addis Ababa suburbs more than three million years ago. Over the millennia some people died before they could reproduce, some lived to reproduce. Of those who did reproduce, some had one child, some had many more. Some of the issue of those parents survived to reproduce and so on until we get to the six or seven billion people now alive. Three million years is a long time, but Humankind really got started about ten thousand years ago as the last ice age receded. Figure four or five generations per century. Imagine the productive power of a single grandmother given four hundred generations.

Next imagine the toll of war, pestilence, disease, natural calamity and pure dumb luck.

The math geniuses among you will want to work out the odds but, trust me, the odds of you being on the planet at this moment are not anything approaching possible. Complicate the calculus further by factoring the odds of your living where you live under the rule of law with the parents you have and the wealth you enjoy. Your unique selfness was lifted up a very steep, very tall cliff to get you here.

Yet here you are. What are we to make of that?

Well, dear ones, we can start with amazement and top it off with gratitude. You can be amazed that something like you that had no say in the matter really matters. You really matter to your friends and family. You matter to me and, one hopes, you’ll matter to the wider world. As zany as it seems, our infinitesimal speck of cosmic dust swirling in an infinitesimal eddy of infinitude of light and space and substance really matters. In a cosmos where it can be said that life is empty and meaningless, where it is empty and meaningless to say that life is empty and meaningless, you are present and meaningful.

That’s why we have reason for gratitude. That’s why expressions of gratitude are important.

Beyond that, though, there is another small matter to consider: We are stuck with each other. We are stuck for better and for worse. We are stuck with all the vagaries that will produce the next generation of people who will matter and who will, in their turn, be stuck with each other.

I’m just sayin’.

Much Love,

Poppy