My man, Chuck’s good for pushing my buttons and makin me write hard. So when he writes, I think what a lot of Conservatives unfairly, ignorantly dismiss is the idea that people rarely do things in a vacuum. There IS often enough a lot of luck in who you are born to, where you’re raised and the people who influence you (peers, etc). You can’t tell me, Ave, that if you were born into the households of some of your old friends that you’d still have wound up the educated, non-record-having writer you are today.

There IS some luck in getting the right kinds of encouragement and the right kinds of support along the way. Not sayin you need a whole village, but the vast majority of us need at least one Gandalf here and there at the right time/place to help inspire, encourage and point the right way. The completely self-made man is a unicorn-rare individual., I hafta pay attention. Or at least address it.

I don’t think there’s any question that luck, good fortune, blessings, providence, or whatever term you wanna use plays a significant role in what happens to a given person. I’m quick to tell people that I’m not sure what would have become of me if I had been born to another mother. Yahmeen, would I be as quick to pick up a book if I had grown up in a house where reading was uncommon, or not valued? Probably not. Would I necessarily have been a hardhead, out there on the street? (Cuz I’m still hardheaded.) Not necessarily. But suggesting that it’s all, or even mostly about good fortune means that the individual person has absolutely no agency. If everything is the result of a certain roll of the dice, for lack of a better term, then the individual has neither control, nor responsibility for what happens in his life. Even I know better than that.

I’ve been pretty forthright about the fact that I usedta hang out with some rough customers a few years ago. Again, my own personal belief is that if you put anybody else in my place, he’s gonna get similar results. Not exactly the same, because we all have different temperaments, and we all have different triggers for our actions, so a person who’s more Type-A than me might have achieved more – or he might have gotten caught up in some nonsense that my laid-backness kept me out of. Still, I’m thinking that in general, it’s reasonable to expect somebody who started where I started to be where I am right now. But see, it’s the conservative in me that makes that argument.

While I readily concede that good fortune plays a significant role in what a person does, and I agree that the American “self-made man” narrative doesn’t leave nearly enough room for the consideration of good fortune, I would still say that the majority of a person’s life is made up of the choices that he or she makes. After all, it’s not like people don’t have choices. They may not recognize the choices that are available, or they may not choose to accept the advice of their counselor (whether they chose the counsel or not), but that doesn’t mean the choice wasn’t presented.

Think about Menace II Society. Caine had options. He didn’t hafta die like he did. Obviously, him playing the girl out and then stomping out her cousin proved to be his ultimate undoing, but some might argue that he was headed towards that type of ending regardless. That just happened to be the incident that got him done in. No, the choices and guardians I’m referring to are his grandparents. Now obviously, he wasn’t feelin the way his grandparents were comin’ at him, lecturing him with the Bible and all. but did that make it any less relevant? Not at all. See the question of whether a person makes a given choice doesn’t change the legitimacy of that choice. In the same way that Caine wound up being a drug-dealing murderer just like his father, he could have chosen to be the church-going choirboy antithesis of his father. Same kid, same circumstances growing up, different choices, different results.

But Caine’s an easy case. What about the dude, Shareef? He, I would say, was the unfortunate victim of bad luck. He had turned his life around. He was a good dude. He got killed while a dude like O-Dog came through unharmed. How’s that work? Beats me. Stuff happens. But see, even in his case, although we wanna let the redemption narrative play itself out and have him live happily ever after, since he actively made the choice to turn his life around, it’s still not inaccurate to say that his choices led to his demise. I mean, we only know the “good” Shareef, but given that he was hanging around Caine and O-Dog ‘nem in the first place, it’s not unreasonable to think that he was doin some of the same stuff they did.

See ultimately, I think — no, I know — life is a combination of choice and chance. Some choices are activated by “luck.” But at the same time, some “luck” is brought from the potential to the kinetic by the active choices people make. I really don’t think it’s possible to parse it down further than that without actually being able to see peoples’ timestreams. However, the part of me that believes in people thinks that they have a great deal of control over their ultimate destination, regardless of the circumstances into which they were born, or even the ones they navigated themselves into. Yeah, a sundry word here and a pick-me-up there can make a huge difference. But it’s also the fact that the person allowed the pick-me-up to actually BE a pick-me-up as opposed to just some platitude somebody who don’t really know what I’m goin through was spittin at me. Or even better, when things DON’T go my way, is it time for lamenting my luck or changing my behavior, so if the same set of circumstances presents itself, I won’t fall for the okey doke again? That, I would argue, ain’t really about luck.

And for real, I don’t know that there’s really any explicitly political label that belongs to this train of thought, but I do think that depending on the set of circumstances, those on the left are more likely to mention the things that are out of a person’s control — except when it came to them. And that’s what gets me. If you really came from the hard-luck side of town, shouldn’t part of your “giving back” be stressing the methods that helped you to get to where you are? That’s all I’m sayin. Cuz the minute somebody who has made it somewhere starts explainin why everybody can’t, I start thinkin they really ain’t a person of the people. Don’t tell me why I can’t, or shouldn’t expect to, tell me how I can and what obstacles I’ll hafta avoid. Chances are, I won’t get the exact same results, but with any luck, my results will be better than they would’ve been otherwise.

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