If you were born in America, you didn’t earn your citizenship. Your good fortune originates from random cosmic luck. In fact, your chances of hitting the “billion dollar lottery” are better than the odds that placed your life in this nation at this moment in time. You could have been born in some “——hole country,” as President Trump put it: malnourished, homeless or dead at age 5 from war. 

Most of the security you enjoy isn’t a product of your “hard work”; it is what happens when you are born in the right place at the right time. You did nothing to earn the basic skills, instincts and safety that allow you to thrive. The people living in the “——hole,” many of whom are children, did nothing to deserve the horrendous circumstances in their lives.

“You are the sum of your inheritances” and so are they. We are no better and no different than those who lack our good cosmic fortune. Concerned that immigrants are getting a “free ride?” Take a look in the mirror: It is you and I who got something — everything — for nothing.

Thomas C. Spallone

Hempfield

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