An Excerpt from "A Short History of Nearly Everything"
If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did - possibly to the nanosecond - you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn't be here either. And if their parents hadn't done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn't be here.
Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations ... and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare ... and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors ...
At twenty generations ago, the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that, and there are no fewer than 33,554,432 men and women on whose devoted couplings our existence depends. By thirty generations ago, your total number of forebears - remember, these aren't cousins and aunts and other incidental relatives, but only parents and parents of parents in a line leading ineluctably to you - is over one billion (1,073,741,824, to be precise). If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.
Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that your line is not pure. You couldn't be here without a little incest - actually quite a lot of incest - albeit at a genetically discreet remove. With so many millions of ancestors in your background, there will have been many occasions when a relative from your mother's side of the family has procreated with some distant cousin from your father's ... In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related. Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or café or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conqueror or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: "Me, too!" In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family. - Bill Bryson
I love this concept! At the level of the building blocks of human beings, we are all somehow related to one another. I wonder what would happen if we all were to start thinking of those around us as family instead of strangers? The problem (well okay, A… problem) with human beings is our innate fascination with categorizing EVERYTHING.
Now before you get the wrong idea, categorization is, I will confess a very helpful tool for structuring our lives. It helps us take a large amount of data and make shortcuts through all of it. However, we tend to get carried away when we apply this tool to humans. We categorize people by gender, race, height, weight, religion, income level, who you were born too, where you were born at, when you were born, even how you were born, your voting preferences, hair, eye and teeth color, your education, your accent, and many, many other things.
Now it can be helpful to group people together for certain reasons; and these categories are not bad in and of themselves. It is what we do after we put people into these categories that cause problems. See, after we have created our shortcuts of figuring out who belongs where, we tend to burn the bridges connecting us all together. We use the categories to separate ourselves from others, and then we try to advance one category over another. And, as we can all agree, we then get a whole mess of problems.
And it’s all silly to me. We are all so closely tied together that things like income level, or place of birth shouldn’t have anything to do with how we treat one another. Who you voted for, should have no bearing on who you invite into your home. What God you believe in should not stop you from loving others wholly and completely.
If you know me, you know that my family isn’t perfect; and I know the family can be a broken place to be. So perhaps saying we are all family doesn’t bring the best images to your mind. However, I feel like a family, in its strongest, best moments is a goal worth shooting for. People caring for each other, understanding that though you don’t think exactly like me, I am going to love you no matter what. We forgive each other, we defend each other, we look out for one another. That is what a family does in it finest moments. It is a pack that makes sure everyone succeeds.
What would our world look like, not if we could all be family, but if we realized we already are?
No comments:
Post a Comment