Born on Third, Thinking They Hit a Triple - And Those Born Outside the Ballpark

I’ve realized I’ve been flaunting a lot recently with the theme of unrealized potential. I’d like to do a little more with that today. A couple weeks ago, Matt Bai wrote the article “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?” for The New York Times Magazine, with the section:

Elijah Cummings, the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and an early Obama supporter, told me a story about watching his father, a South Carolina sharecropper with a fourth-grade education, weep uncontrollably when Cummings was sworn in as a representative in 1996. Afterward, Cummings asked his dad if he ad been crying tears of joy. “Oh, you know, I’m happy,” his father replied. “But now I realize, had I been given the opportunity, what I could have been. And I’m about to die.” In any community shadowed by oppression, pride and bitterness can be hard to untangle.

Cummings’ father was referring to a deliberate and intentional oppression. What about circumstances where people are never allowed to develop to their potential simply given the conditions of the environment which they were raised into? Many of the great thinkers were born into wealthy families – the common interpretation was that the capacity for higher through was exclusively hereditary, ignoring the obvious (and in my view probable) alternative that wealth set-up an individual for further greatness in the event a genius emerged.

Maybe in an isolated tribe in the bush, there exists a human with – or at least the potential for – incredible genius, with the ability to make breakthroughs that might ameliorate the conditions of mankind. Yet that genius remains untapped, simply because of the circumstance this person was born into, isolated and never connected to the rest of society. Instead of curing cancer, reforming government justly, or solving the energy crisis, they spend their days flinting tools from stones.

During the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, as the Palestine delegation entered the stadium, the commentators identified one athlete as a swimming and commented that the there isn’t a single Olympic-sized pool in all of the terretories. Imagine a country without swimming pools – maybe there’s a natural-swimmer there greater than Phelps that never had a chance to discover what he might have been.