Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?

I have read Dr. Seuss books to my kids since they were in utero, and there's a pretty solid reason why my blog is titled The Thinks You Can Think.  The good Dr. teaches kids about environmental stewardship in The Lorax, about the silliness of keeping up with whoever in The Star Belly Sneetches, about self esteem and also how to deal with bad times in Oh, the Places You'll Go.  But one that I keep reading them as they grow up in this affluent American culture is Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are. 
As I listened to the radio news on NPR this week, I am reminded how lucky we truly are.  We could live in West Africa and be staring down the barrel of an Ebola outbreak that our nation's medical system is woefully ill-equipped to handle.  Here, I have heard more worry from CDC about a bad flu epidemic than I do about Ebola, it's not an airborne pathogen (therefore more easily contained) and it is actually treatable with the resources and medicines available to us (if you will notice the American folk who were shipped home a few months ago and treated are mostly doing just fine).  I shiver when I think of the number of human lives that are going to be claimed by this disease, just because they aren't "lucky" enough to live in a place that could stop it.
Also, I think about the children in Ukraine, who went back to school later than usual because of a teacher's strike, oh no wait, it was because of a war, that a whole bunch of people on both sides don't want to admit is even happening.  Hearing a description on the radio yesterday of a reporter on the scene and he said it was shocking to hear the sound of children playing and parents sending them off to their first day of school while mortar shells exploded some five kilometers away.  It choked me up a little.  I wondered if I would have the courage to send my kids to school if I knew mortars were going off anywhere in the vicinity.  I was awed by the adaptability of human beings, and I was sorrowful that some of us have to adapt to that sort of horror. I get the sense that perhaps "lucky" is a bad word to describe what we are.
And now Hong Kong, people are protesting in the streets and calling for a change, and it seems mostly peaceful and somewhat hopeful, but a man, who covered the 1988 events in Tiananmen square, said that it seemed that way there too, until the army and the tanks showed up.  I wonder if China has changed very much in almost 20 years, and then I remember how old China is, and how slowly they change, and I worry for all those people in Hong Kong, who just want a little more "luck."
Finally, there was the report from Baghdad, Where some "lucky" Iraqis were enjoying themselves at a park along the Tigris river, or trying to enjoy themselves if it weren't for the very Irish sounding BBC reporter who kept reminding them that the Islamic State fighters were only a few miles away, and that their defense forces were probably not going to be able to stop them.  I wondered how lucky they felt when their best choice was to "invite" the imperial powers of the west back into their city, to once again occupy and once again start the bombing, in order to protect them.  I wonder if they feel "lucky?"
We live in a culture that believes, by and large, that you make your own luck.  We are the work hard and play smart and you'll rise to the top, but we don't adequately account for all the luck that goes into being able to believe that.
Telling ourselves how lucky we are doesn't necessarily produce the necessary empathy for the plight of our fellow human beings.  We must remember that we don't deserve our "luck" any more than they deserve theirs.  Jesus said, "to those to whom much has been given, much will be required," most people think he was talking about some spiritual gift of salvation, but maybe he was simply talking about "luck."
In that case, perhaps we should re-think some of our foreign policies.