Generally speaking, anyone alive and using the Internet today is among the wealthiest fraction of human beings ever to walk the earth. We have so much stuff but our gratitude is often misplaced.
A college professor and mentor liked to put things into perspective by asking me to imagine the typical day of a medieval royal, a person who, in his time, counted himself among the most fortunate mammals in history. Take a royal in medieval England, who might wake up in a September morning cold. For breakfast, he may eat his fill of salted herring and wash it down with wine--the only beverage he could trust not to give him cholera (only the most wretched drank water). I am no royal, but I will wake up tomorrow to shower in some of the cleanest water known to man, heated effortlessly with fuel pulled from deep underground and shipped across the sea. I enjoy a cup of coffee from another climate and ride a bicycle down a beautiful network of streets and stop-lights--hundreds of thousands of us running in all different directions each day with virtually no problems. I trust--not naively--that everyone respects the rule of the red lights, and ride ceaselessly through the green without concern for my life. I ride to a job that secures my livelihood with little risk or effort (Imagine what it would mean to hunt these hills or till these fields or fish this bay.). And if I fail at my job--or if my job fails me--I am comforted by a safety net that ensures that I will live better than the royals of yesterday could imagine. Compared to almost anyone who has ever lived, my life is indulgent... and I still haven't told you about the iPhone.
If we are not grateful to our parents for their sacrifices and investments then we are either ingrates or fools. But the true source of our material wealth is our good fortune to live in a place where a civil order prevails. It's only in the comforts of that order that we make progress. All of my gratitude comes back to this. I live in a place where I have the comfort of knowing that you will stop on your red light; the comfort of knowing that a primitive lock will protect my bicycle while I work; the comfort of knowing that if I loose my job the safety net will save me; the comfort of knowing that if my bank fails, my savings are secure; the comfort of knowing that even when the fiber of our economy is rattled by crisis, the greatest intellectual resources are coming to the helm to restore it because I live in a place where I have the comfort of knowing that when I vote the old order out of office, they will leave peacefully on January 20th.
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