We've had a spectacular, contentious political season. A little more than half the nation is rejoicing, and a tad less than half is feeling rather dejected.
At the same time, we're all becoming rather nervous about the economic storm clouds still gathering overhead, even as we feel the first drops of rain and hear thunder booming distantly overhead. Some of us have friends who are losing jobs; some of us are nervously contemplating the effects of deflation on our student loans; some of us are simply not sure how we'll fare in a jobless society where a bachelor's degree doesn't mean so much anymore.
Now is a good time to take a step back and take a wider look at our place in the world and as a result appreciate just how lucky we are. Let's start with per capita GDP, a crude indicator of living standards. If our economy shrunk by half - a disaster unprecedented even by the Great Depression - and our income distribution remained relatively stable, we would still be better off than Portugal, Hungary, Saudi Arabia and Poland, to name a few nations. That's right: We're so rich now that if our economy completely collapses, we'll still be in the richer half of the world.
You could have been born in Swaziland, Angola, Zimbabwe or some other sub-Saharan, AIDS-ravaged country where, by now, you'd be more than half done with your life. Instead, you ended up in the world's wealthiest country, against odds of 1:25. You could have been born when life was "nasty, brutish and short," when absolute monarchs ruled hierarchical theocracies or when plagues killed one in every three people. Instead, you were born into a modern civilization whose technological advancements are so widespread that it depends on moving electrons to function, and people routinely travel at excess of 500 mph.
For more than 99.9 percent of humankind's history, 15 mph was fast. Twenty mph was an exhausting short sprint. Our daily commutes are effortlessly twice as fast. When we need to travel thousands of miles - distances it took our remote hunter-gatherer ancestors generations to cover - we take to the skies in technological achievements thought impossible even several centuries ago.
How many of us have computers? Who could have imagined such things even a century ago? Or cell phones, whose existence was still restricted to fantastic science fiction in the 1960s? Even James Bond was using car phones in "From Russia with Love."
Socially, even, we're well beyond (hopefully permanently) the days when women were the property of men or when a man could be fined by selling his family into slavery. When the Constitution was written, black slaves were legally worth three-fifths of a white person. Women weren't even mentioned. Now, we have universal suffrage past the age of 18 - a step toward equitable democracy.
I've made a big deal about Proposition 8 and anti-gay discrimination, but once upon a time, marriage was an issue of political and social convenience, not love. So even if we have a lot of work to do when it comes to equal rights, we're still far better than 1700, 1950 and even many other countries in the modern world.
In fact, that same thought applies across the board. We argue and tussle over how to solve our society's problems (or whether they even are problems), but for much of history and for much of the rest of the world today, people would have given an arm, a leg and a firstborn child to have our problems instead of the ones they faced.
So spare a thought of gratitude this Thursday as you prepare to eat more food in a day than most people will see in a year. Count your lucky stars or thank your deity of choice for living in a modern Western country. And don't buy any lottery tickets, because you've already won it by being born here and now.
Write to Neal at necoleman@bsu.edu
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