Truly Gifted

You’re invited over for dinner to a friend’s house — someone you genuinely like. Maybe you met at work or at the gym, and you’ve been meaning to spend some time together. You walk in, meet the family, and quickly realize something’s off. The kids are 9 and 7, but they behave like toddlers. They’re loud, disruptive, out of control. The parents don’t step in. The parents begin sniping at each other. And then…..when you least expect it, or maybe you did, the parents announce that their children are “gifted.”You want to curl into the fetal position. Mozart was gifted. Not these kids. But you wanted to like this family, to spend time with them. You hoped for better. So you endure, leave as early as possible, and silently promise yourself: never again.That, my friends, is the modern West.

The New Religion of Grievance

Now you go out for a beer. You want adult conversation. But eventually, politics surfaces. It always does. And then the performance begins.If your new friend happens to be gay, that’s suddenly the only thing that matters. He isn’t just Bob anymore — he’s Gay Bob. Maybe you wanted to talk about the playoffs, or music or how lousy the beer is. Instead, the conversation is hijacked into some performative woke opera. You’re supposed to be shocked, moved, impressed. But mostly — you’re bored.Then there’s the Latina friend who can’t get through a sentence without reminding you she’s Latina. Or the woman who filters everything through gender as if you’d never met a woman before. Everyone has a label and a grievance.In Athens, in London, in Los Angeles — it’s the same chorus: everyone is aggrieved, everyone is owed, everyone wants to be heard but no one wants to listen. The past is paraded like a permanent open wound. Newspapers, academic journals, dinner tables, and family gatherings all collapse into endless grievances: slavery, colonization, oppression, identity, privilege, or just general bitching. The list never ends, and it’s never enough.

Birth is Just a Beginning

The new thing in our enlightened 21st century is that people now want a trophy for being born, and especially being born a certain way.There are between 130 to 140 million births globally every year. That computes to about 250 births per minute, or four births per second. Of those births there are millions of people who are gay, black, women, Greek, Turk, Jewish, Asian, Palestinian, or hillbillies of every nationality. Where and when you are born is purely an accident. It’s not an accomplishment. It’s something that happens to you.In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was believed that being born into an aristocratic family made you better. It didn’t. It made you lucky. Go to any major city and the streets are full of the unlucky. Walk the back streets of Vietnam or China and come face to face with the orphans. Apart from those very few lucky enough to be adopted by a family, life is brutal and short. Those few children are not defined by where they started or where they were born, They are defined by what they do next.So your birth isn’t your story. It’s your prologue. And those kids who are able to make the most of their second chance shake off the idea they had a rough childhood and ask, “Compared to who?”

What Makes Us Unique

What makes us unique is not the accident of our birth. If you were born to parents who didn’t want you, get in line. If you were born to parents who didn’t accept your sexuality or your choice of career, get in line. If you were born the wrong color or ethnic group and weren’t liked by other people, get in line. That doesn’t make you special. That makes you the same as everyone else. Take a number.Gay Bob isn’t special because he’s gay. There are millions like him. Susie isn’t special because she grew up in Brentwood. Billions have been born lucky. What makes anyone unique is what they do once they leave the starting blocks.

The Race Swindle

For all the talk about race, it’s a con. Humans have been mixed since before we started writing things down. During the Hellenistic era, no one would have understood the modern obsession with “race.” Everyone was “racially” mixed — too obviously so to even mention it. What mattered was culture, not melanin.Unless your family tree was grown in a laboratory, you’re a mutt like the rest of us. Sicilians are part African. Turks are part Greek. Jews are part Palestinian. Mexicans are a mixture of Spanish and Indian descent. Despite this fact, we are still genetically, 99.9% the same. Race is a marketing gimmick invented by colonial powers and their pet intellectuals to justify slavery, segregation, and atrocity. It is scientifically fake, politically useful, and endlessly profitable.

There’s only one race: the human race. Everything else is branding.

The Oppression Swindle

History is not a safe space for any of us. Everyone’s ancestors were both victims and villains. Greeks lived under the Ottomans for 450 years and it was awful. But, during the War of Independence they committed atrocities that would make any Greek patriot want to vomit. The Iroquois launched a war of extermination against the Huron over the fur trade. The Incas massacred rival tribes such as the Chimu and the Canari. It was so bad that when the Spanish arrived, the rival Indian tribes actually allied with the Spanish against the Incas. The so-called gentle Amazonian tribes engaged in tribal warfare, rape, murder and cannibalism. In Africa, the Dahomean warriors conducted large-scale slave raids on neighboring people such as the Yoruba and the Mahi.History is a long ledger of grievances, written in blood. And the blood is on all of us.

What Makes You Special

So what makes you special is not that you were born. It is not your “race” because we are one race. It is not your sexuality. Not your alleged victimhood. None of that makes you unique. It makes you the same.What makes us unique is what we do. The Buddha was just your average boring prince before he became the Buddha. There were plenty of carpenters in Nazareth before Jesus came along. The Wright brothers had a printing business and fixed bicycles before they invented flight. What set Wayne Gretzky and Cristiano Ronaldo apart was hours and hours of practice, not the accident of their birth.

Truly Gifted

Those who are truly unique and “gifted” constitute less than .003% of the human population. The truly gifted, the Einsteins, the Mozarts and the Newtons don’t come along very often.So as a relief to all of you parents who feel pressured to live up to the standards of your gifted child, don’t worry about it. They’re not gifted. They might be clever. They might be precocious. But the odds are strongly against their being born “gifted.”Their happiness, their success, and their uniqueness will be predicated on what they do, not their genetics or demographic category.So what makes us unique, or special? Being a good person. A good mom or a good dad. A good neighbor. A good friend. A diligent person. Someone who feels gratitude rather than entitlement. For all their brilliance, Dostoyevsky and Einstein died at their writing tables. Raised in comfort and privilege, Buddha and Gandhi chose poverty. Despite their prodigious gifts, they worried more about what they did each day rather than their demographics.It is our demographic that makes us the opposite of unique. It is defying our demographic, challenging our sense of entitlement and practicing virtue that makes us truly great. Even more importantly, it is our gratitude over being given the chance to do so that makes our lives meaningful. If any of us are lucky enough to have such a chance, take it.And even if the vast majority of will never be genetically gifted, that’s the next best thing.