I seem to keep coming across the byline of a woman who feels her generation didn’t get what it deserved from preceding generations. Although I won’t set fire to enough money or time to buy and read her book, I feel safe in assuming she feels she and her cohort got less than they deserved from their predecessors. That’s simply not possible, because none of us deserve anything from anybody.

This is another in a long line of entitlements that have proliferated in American life over the past few decades. Others include the idea that a first job after graduating from college “should” pay at least a certain amount, that adversity in any form is “unfair,” and that the world owes us something. These ideas might be reasonable if we could establish that any generation has received something for nothing. Has any generation that has gone off to war received something for nothing in that exchange? What of generations that have experienced economic recession or depression? Were the children forced to work in dangerous conditions during the Industrial Revolution better off than your generation? What of everyone who lived before the advent of Medicare and Medicaid, or general assistance and nutritional support? I suppose the development of penicillin and other antibiotics actually made life worse?

To be clear, each generation has its particular challenges and particular blessings. Those challenges are how human beings learn and grow. While it may seem to us that preceding generations had things easier than ours does, an objective examination and a broad view show that belief to be primarily the result of a self-pity that is most unattractive. We all stand on the shoulders of the generations that went before us. None of us deserves anything we don’t earn. If we receive something we didn’t earn, that’s grace – something we would all do well to remember on Thanksgiving Day, and throughout the year.