You know, I don't mean to be ungrateful. Really. I don't.
It's not the way I was raised. "Be grateful for small favors."
Grandma used to say stuff like that all the time. When you'd
complain about some injury, like a teacher was nasty, or your
feet hurt, she'd shrug and say "some people don't have any
legs." Or, "people are starving in Armenia", she'd
say, as she filled your plate with food you didn't want.
Well, they're starving in Armenia again, Grandma. And in Bosnia,
and Chechnya, and a bunch of other places I can barely pronounce,
but they all sound like places my grandmother could have been
from. I could be from there. I could be living in one of those
places now, starving and ducking bombs, if my grandmother hadn't
gotten the hell out. Gotten out when she was still an ungrateful
girl herself. A servant girl, who refused to listen to some priest's
sermon about her duty. A hungry servant girl, who stole meat
from her master's dog.
I figure that must be why we're all so ungrateful, so restless
here. America is bubbling over with the genepool of the people
who wouldn't sit still. We're all the children and grandchildren
and great-grandchildren of the ones who refused to sit and take
whatever was dished out. So we're all congenitally ungrateful,
you and I. We sit in our houses surrounded by riches and privilege
and every convenience and advantage, bitching and moaning our
heads off. (CONTINUES )
