Why you don't have the Right to Complain about Events that happened before you were born.

I remember watching a public speaker angrily rail about events and travesties that occured over a hundred years ago.  The speaker passionately railed against past social injustices and it was almost as if they were reliving the injustice themselves as they spoke.  "Ok, you are right", I said to myself, "that shouldn't have happened, but if it had not happened, YOU AND I WOULD NOT EXIST TODAY!"

Imagine Clint Eastwood with a gun to your temple and his fist clenching your soiled collar, asking you as only Clint can, "well punk, do you want to change the past so badly that it means you would have never been born?  Well, do ya, you self righteous punk".   I am not brave enough to answery yes to that scenario, how about you?

I consider it stealing to relive the distant past with present day anger and rage and using that rage to try and get ahead or profit.  If the moment in question had never happened,  the chain reaction of events would inevitably mean that you would never have been born.  Practically anything that happened up until the day you were conceived, if it had happened differently, might have resulted in a differently timed sequence of events that would have resulted in all of those delightful sperm being tumbled out of the starting gate in a different order and position.

As many as 500 million sperm cells are jockeying for position when they began their race to impregnate the female ovum.  The time, place, and displacement of the sperm along with how fertile the ovum was feeling at a specific moment in time create such a huge amount of variables that if a fellow sperm had won out, YOU WOULD NOT BE HERE.

So the next time you are either anger about the past, or wish you had been born differently than you were, the odds are pretty much stacked that you were destined to come out as you.  It's what you do afterwards that you can take some of the credit for.

(Original version written on Tuesday, January 16, 2007)