This post goes back a couple of weeks, but I thought it worth sharing. I’ve been half-listening to some graduation speeches on C-SPAN, and that parting line from one of them jumped out at me. What does it mean to be a good ancestor?

What might it consist of?

Certainly doing the things that prepare our infrastructure to meet future needs – better transportation systems within and between our biggest cities.

Creating a society that works for everyone – our own descendants and those of people whose situations are most unlike our own. Creating a society where every child – those who learn easily and those who learn with difficulty; those born with every advantage and those whose parents’ income, for whatever reason, can buy them few; those of high intelligence and those of lower intelligence; those with healthy bodies and those who are born with or find themselves living with less than perfect bodies; those who inherit trust funds or are helped with college educations or down payments on homes, and those who must find ways to meet their own costs from just-out-of-school incomes – can flourish and provide adequately for his or her own children without delaying children until biological clocks and retirement-savings-clocks are ticking loudly.

Are we up to it? Or should we be satisfied with a society where the top 1% of us have nearly 1/4 of the income, and the bottom 90% of us live on less than half the income? Are the top 1% really that productive, and the bottom 90% that unproductive – or have our ancestors handed down to us a tradition of treating what should be common as if it were private property for some?

Be a good ancestor. Figure out what is legitimately private property, and what is rightly common property, and adjust our structure, our traditions, to make that real.

That’s being a good ancestor.