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gopperl • yesterday at 11:29 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

There's no luck involved in the fact that you were born to your parents, as they were to theirs. It is right to be proud of the achievements of your ancestors who have, over countless generations, toiled and strived to deliver the place that we were so fortunate to inherit from them. It reminds us of our responsibility to defend and improve that place for the coming generations of our people.

Replies

ninjagoo • today at 12:08 AM

  > There's no luck involved in the fact that you were born to your parents, as they were to theirs.
Are you claiming to have controlled where and to whom you were born?

You did not choose your parents, country, ancestry, class, era, genes, language, or inherited institutions. You may be inseparable from those facts, but you did not earn them.

  > There's no luck involved in the fact that you were born to your parents
  > we were so fortunate to inherit from them.
These two statements appear to be contradictory.

  > It is right to be proud of the achievements of your ancestors
And what was your contribution to those achievements to justify this pride?

You have to be careful to not fall into the trap of borrowed glory: treating an ancestor’s achievement as your own personal merit, or using ancestry to rank yourself above others.

  > toiled and strived to deliver the place that we were so fortunate to inherit
  > our responsibility to defend and improve that place for the coming generations of our people.
Are you implying that the place belongs more fully to descendants of earlier inhabitants than to newer members of the community?

So then Native Americans have a stronger claim than European descendants? Or is that a standard to only be applied moving forward?

That's also like the caste system in India: only children of brahmins can be brahmins, children of shudras can only be shudras. One is superior to another by inheritance, not merit.

That's ugly and abhorrent.

  > It is right to be proud of the achievements of your ancestors
Are you then also ashamed of their crimes?
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kelnos • today at 9:01 AM

I think that kind of pride is pointless and unproductive.

I think it is right to be grateful to your ancestors for their achievements in ultimately giving you the life that you have.

But proud? Hubris lies down that path.

Re: luck, yes, it is absolutely luck that you were born to the parents you were born to, located in the place you were born in. I think you have the sense of the luck direction flipped from what GP meant. If you look at it from the perspective of your ancestors, then sure, your birth wasn't luck: it was a choice (or an accident, I suppose).

But from the perspective of you, it's luck: you didn't get to choose the circumstances surrounding your birth. You got lucky in that sense; you could have instead had bad luck and been born on the streets in a third-world country to a drug-addicted single parent with no money and no prospects.

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