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"Nations, as well as men, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years." -- Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America"
I just started reading "And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle," by the biographer Jon Meacham.
I'm fewer than 100 pages in, but those early pages make many powerful points about how the upbringing, environment, and literary diet of the young future president shaped his political and philosophical outlook.
And that got me thinking about how my young life and the art and information I consumed shaped me, how I might be different if I ingested different input, and how everyone we meet presents as the product of their own input, and how can we judge them for that?
Lincoln abhorred his impoverished upbringing and longed to rise above it, latching on to a family legend that his true maternal grandfather was not the poor farmer who lived with his grandmother but a Virginia gentleman.
Lincoln likely witnessed the horrors of slavery as slave-runners hiked chained Black men, women, and children through the Kentucky town of his childhood, growing to further despise the institution because of the abolitionist Baptists who taught him the word of God and his parents, who joined abolitionist associations.
Lincoln was further shaped by his voracious reading as a youngster, including classics such as "Robinson Crusoe" and contemporaries such as William Grimshaw's "History of the United States," which included the following passage: "Let us not only declare by words, but demonstrate by our actions, 'That all men are created equal.'" Such works likely cemented his distaste for the institution of slavery while filling him with a sense of adventure and a longing for a life beyond his meager surroundings.
Taken together, Meachem infers, those ingredients -- poverty, abolitionist teachings, and a worldly understanding born of book after book -- created an Abraham Lincoln who believed in the God-ordained equality of all men while filled with an insatiable ambition to rise above his stature.
Poverty acted as an ingredient in my own life, the kind of poverty that sometimes meant cupboards bare of anything but saltine crackers, butter, bread, and sugar. Eating more than one "sugar sandwich" in my day, I remember vowing at a young age that I'd never put myself or my family in that situation. So I've worked pretty much nonstop since age 15.
My mother, who raised me and my brother by herself during my most formative years, was surely the most important ingredient in my life. She taught me many lessons, including the fact that all men bleed red blood as God's children and how to always act with integrity and to own up to my mistakes. She taught me I could be anything I wanted to be if I worked hard.
Her most important lesson, however, was not what she said but what she showed: Young Justin watched his mother work a full-time job while going to college full-time so she could make a better life for herself and her children.
And she did.
The cupboards overflowed by the time I hit middle school.
Christopher Reeve's Superman movies, over which I obsessed as a lad (I wore my Superman pajamas under my clothes to kindergarten), instilled in me a love of truth, justice, and the American way.
I loved books, especially adventure books like the Cooper Kids series by Frank Peretti (a sort of Christian Indiana Jones family) and all of Gary Paulsen's books and classics such as Jack London's "The Call of the Wild," all of which made me thirst for adventure and something bigger than myself.
Later, I read "All the President's Men," by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which all but guaranteed I'd grow up to be a journalist (Superman was a journalist, too). Later still, I read the journalist Hunter S. Thompson for the first time, fostering my love for individualism and politics and kinetic words.
Together, those ingredients -- poverty, a wise and diligent mother, adventure books, many other things -- cooked inside my psyche and made me who I am today.
The same, I believe, is true for all of us. We each are sculpted by our pasts, which can sometimes trap us in generational cycles or sometimes compel us into something greater than our former selves -- depending, I believe, on the sources of inspiration available to us in our formative years.
And that's one more reason -- if we need more than God's commandment -- we shouldn't judge. People act and think the way they do in large part because of the input they received in their youth, some of which happened by chance and some of it beyond their control.
"There, but for the grace of God, go I" is the truest thing that's ever been said.
Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.