Hacker News Reader

Comment by gmueckl | Hacker News Reader

Stories like this make me realize how unfairly privileged I actually am by having the passport that I have. I can go damn near anywhere in the world without much fuss. But I was just lucky enough to be born on the right side of some line that somebody drew on a map at some time in the past. The folks a few km distant - on the other side of that line - don't have that same luxury.

It is kind of sad that we have this way of carving up the world into arbitrary pieces and calling us "us" and them "the enemy".

View on HN

>It is kind of sad that we have this way of carving up the world into arbitrary pieces and calling us "us" and them "the enemy".

It's not arbitrary, our ancestors in many cases fought and died to establish those lines so that they could live their lives how they wanted within those lines. They worked hard so that their children and grandchildren and fellow citizens could have better lives within those lines. To discount that as luck is demeaning to the sacrifices of the people who came before you

The reality of these lines are usually less noble than you describe in many cases.

As an example, if you read about the motivations of specific actors in the American revolutionary war, many of the top dissenters were basically interested in not paying taxes and being the boss of their own piece of land (instead of having oversight from across the pond). Nobody is ethically pure, of course, but the main push for the revolutionary war was done out of massive self-interest from people in power.

"There was a time that we were noble" is something that rarely plays out in practice. Why should it? If anything humanity has gotten more, not less, ethical and noble over time.

There's an idea of fighting for justice and truth, and then there's trying to die to establish lines on a map. They're not the same thing, and I'd say that it's rarely coinciding in practice

I never said it was noble, but doing something in your own self-interest can still be positive. Even if the US revolution was for the founders financial benefit, the side effect was the spread of democracy and self-determination across the globe.

They might just be "lines on a map" but they mean something to people, just 50 years ago those "lines" were the difference between living in a communist hellhole and freedom and prosperity. There's a lot of cubans and eastern europeans who risked their lives to get on the other side of some lines on a map and get a better life for themselves and their children.

If people hadn't been willing to fight and die to defend those lines and their ability to live how they want, we wouldn't be able to have this discussion right now

thats absolutely true for america.

he might've been from europe though, and we really did have ... a lot of blood wasted to draw out these lines... we kept killing each other for them

That still isn't noble.

depends on your definition of noble i guess.

bloodshed and misery of the commons is a very ... 'noble' thing. by which i mean that every noble in europes history enjoyed it.

i'd agree to the spirit of your message though, and the grandparent post probably as well. he probably didn't mean it like you interpreted it

In the USA's case it's more like "committed mass genocide to win land"...

Doesn't sound so noble then, eh?

The historical reality check being that it's been a few hundred thousand years now since land was won in wholesale quantity by any other means, sabre-toothed cats having lost their place at the top of the food chain quite some time ago.

Carthaginians, Celts, Bosnians, Tutsi, Rohingya ...

We do not have any influence on which side of the line we are born : that's purely luck.

Do you exist before birth, in some other pool of souls?

The point is that the specific human body that ends up achieving self-awareness as me is determined entirely by chance.

if you believe in genetics/evolution it's not luck. The smarter and stronger side wins. Is it luck that you weren't born as a squirrel or some other animal?

My family members fought in wars, paid taxes, and helped build up the country so their descendants could have a better life, calling that nothing but luck is disrespectful to the sacrifices they made.

But you yourself did not have any control over where or when you were born. Even your parents' say in that matter was likely limited.

Also, statistically, birthrates are higher in less developed countries with worse living conditions.

> They worked hard so that their children and grandchildren and fellow citizens could have better lives within those lines

That's sort of the whole point; often improving the lives of "fellow citizens" came at the expense of everyone else

I'm someone who was born with a "shitty" passport. It's not the visa part, but rather I can't spontaneously just "go somewhere". All my travels need to be planned weeks, if not months, ahead. Fortunately, I'm on a path to acquire another citizenship and my children will have a "good" passport at birth.

Which two countries, if you don't mind saying? I don't think it would compromise your throwaway status.

Vietnam -> Australia

As an extension to that, as someone else who has a french "powerful passport", you get so used to it that you feel very bothered when you actually need to get a visa for some place. Or worse, when you plan to go somewhere and a member of your group is not from such a country and needs a visa for a place that you didn't expect him to need one for.

I'm glad it's like this for me, and I hope the world can keep moving forward in that direction (as an european I'm kind of used to no borders between countries, the same way US people move between states); but at the same time I'm not sure how healthy it is to have such privileges and not even recognize them as such anymore.

I guess this is what causes the people from "our" countries calling themselves expat rather than immigrants (we've had a case this week again, where an english immigrant in France complained on twitter about immigrants coming to France ...).

I believe remembering what is a privilege you are lucky have is important, maybe if we were better at that we would have less on the modern "social stupidity" issues (another matter entirely but if people knew how lucky they were of not having polio and/or knew someone related to them who got it, they would be much less likely to avoid vaccination ...).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com