I was born toward the end of the Great Depression and came into awareness during World War II.  Nonetheless, my childhood was quiet and secure.  The Depression touched me only because it haunted my father, but the war had little impact.

Yes, of course, we had rationing. 

But we also had a Victory Garden and chickens in our small back yard. 

Yes, we had black-out curtains.

But the only planes that flew over our small Midwestern town were the ones my brother and I used to rush outside in delight to watch every time they came rumbling over.

Yes, a girl in my class lost her father “over there.”  

But my father received his draft notice on the birthday that made him just too old to be called, so our lives and his job as a chemist in a cement mill went on without interruption.

One day, though, a few years after the war ended, I suddenly realized something that had never occurred to me before: 

That the war, so safely distant for me, had been fought in other children’s cities and on their streets. 

That some of those children had died. 

I still remember exactly where I was standing in my yard when that simple and austere fact hit me.

And I can remember the simple question that followed: “Why not me?” 

Why should other children have lived through that destruction, that terror, that loss while I remained untouched?

It’s a question I have asked again at many different moments in the years of my life that followed.  Why not me?

When another country’s economy collapses, when governments become dysfunctional and societies disintegrate into chaos and people flee with no place to go, when unchecked illness stalks, when soldiers maraud and rape and kill . . . why not me?

When natural disasters kill and displace thousands, hundreds of thousands . . . why not me?

And today, right here, when so many struggle with illness, with loss of work, with a system designed to destroy them . . . why not me?

What confluence of happenchance has kept me untouched for 81 years? 

I was born in the United States to hardworking parents who taught me to value education.  That was happenchance.

I was born white in a world where whiteness brings privilege in more ways than I will ever fully comprehend.  That was happenchance, too. 

I was born into an economy that, with occasional hiccups, has grown and expanded my entire life.  Another happenchance.

I was born into a world that was busy dreaming nuclear weapons, and that such a dream has yet to destroy everything I am and everything I know is certainly the most amazing happenchance of all. 

What do I do with such unearned privilege?  How do I justify myself to my grandchildren, just now emerging into an adult world that offers so much less?

And how do I live daily with the knowledge that these familiar riches I never earned are being taken away in my own lifetime?

Beyond my small attempts to support justice in a world blind to justice, I know of only one other answer . . . to live in gratitude.  Every day.  Every moment of every day.

Gratitude for my long, rich past. 

Gratitude for this moment.

And for this one.

And for this.