the myth of bootstrapping

He is a self-made man. She came from nothing. 

These are lovely stories, but they are fiction. One does not make one's self. One must come from somewhere.

The myth of bootstrapping is exactly that --a myth.

Think about it: where did you come from? Unless you spontaneously generated, an egg and a sperm combined and you grew in a womb. Someone raised you --maybe well or maybe not well, but someone raised you. People do not make it from infancy to childhood to adulthood without interacting with other people and without resources of some kind. 


What did you eat to survive? That was provided by someone. Nowadays, our food is shipped around from here to there. What roads did those trucks drive to get the food to you? Those were built using collected funds. Did the food come in through a port? Again, somebody organized that. Or maybe the food came from a farm? Farms are largely subsidized. Even if you got it from a dumpster, someone put it in the dumpster --and we have sanitation services in many of our communities. Clean water to drink? Thank water treatment, another form of infrastructure provided by people pooling their resources. And the list goes on ...

If you are reading this, you may have gone to school, or maybe you taught yourself to read. Either way, someone else was involved there, too. A teacher? A librarian? You're reading this on the Internet. Did you invent the Internet (this is sarcasm directed at everyone but Al Gore ...)? Did you generate your own electricity?

The point is, none of us are truly independent and we need other people. We are social creatures. We can't do it all by ourselves, and we don't. Even if you're not inclined to like people, you don't exist in a vacuum because you can't. 

There's a great program that pops up every once in a while on PBS in the US about a man named Dick Proenneke called Alone In The Wilderness. He recorded his time in the Alaskan wilderness in exquisite detail --I'm using the word 'exquisite', but he wasn't at all fancy. He just described the experience very well. He hunted, fished, built his own log cabin from the ground up, ... . This man made his own tools and hinges for his door, for goodness sake! He comes about as close as anyone can to being 'self-made'. Seriously, watch that linked video --he's incredible!

But guess what: a float plane brought him in, brought him supplies, and took out mail for him. He communicated with other people via his videos and journals.

No one can pull themselves up by their bootstraps alone. This is not to say there aren't people who have disadvantages and still manage to do extraordinary things. Those people, though, were aided by someone else, somewhere along the line. They utilized that aid to the best of their abilities, and great things happened. But were they self-made? Did they come from nothing? No.  

Community is important. People need people, or it's hard to survive. Here's hoping all of us --including our legislators, in their infinite wisdom --remember that. And when I need help (and occasionally, I do, even though I am Supergirl and Wonder Woman all rolled into one), I'd like to know that help is there. I have to be willing to do the same; it's only fair. The truth is, bootstraps require more than two hands.