You are lucky.

I know that I am. I am extremely lucky. Even though, in all honesty, I haven't had the perfect life.

My dad was an alchoholic. He left me and my mom when I was two and a half. I will never know what it's like to have a dad who provides for you and who will always be there for you.

My life hasn't been perfect.

When I was in fifth grade, my aunt Suzie died of liver failure. She was taken to the hospital and my mom and I were asked to babysitt my cousins while my aunts who were Suzie's sisters went to visit her at the hospital. That whole night, I was numbed with pain. As we lay the kids to bed (even though I too was a kid at the time), I lay down on the living room floor and looked out the glass window. Outisde, the sky was clear and beautiful. The backyard was green and smooth. Nature was just as awe-inspiring as ever. I remember closing my eyes and crying, begging God not to let Suzie die. Again and again and again, I asked God to let her live. Please let her live.

The next moring, I found out she had died probably around the same time I was begging her to live. My whole family went into a state of shock. My aunt, who had lost her husband the following year, had to approach her young daughter and tell her that now her favorite aunt was dead too. My grandfather, the man who had basically served as my father for all my life, then went into a spirally depression and was taken to a Psyche Hospital, were he stayed for three months.

Again, my life hasn't been perfect.

Here's the point: none of us have perfect lives. It doesn't matter if your living the America Dream. You may have a mom and a dad and a sister and a brother and a cat and a dog and a two car garage in the richest suburb in America: you still don't have the perfect life.

Whoever said that we'd have perfection? No one. As humans we are flawed and therefore, all of our lives will be flawed. But I think that we must take a step back and realize how lucky we are.

I was reading a book called, First They Killed My Father, a true story of a young girl growing up in Cambodia during the time of the Khemor Rouge. In her first thirteen years, she lived to see her family be thrown from her home, her father be taken away and killed, her sister Keav die of malnutriation and infection, her mother and little baby sister executed because they weren't strong enough, her family nearly starve with so little food, her family be seperated, and her whole childhood spent with hatred and killing and death.

Somehow this little girl, Loung Ung, was able to survive and write her story for all so that we may know the sufferings of the world and try to prevent this from happening again.

Reading her story and other's life hers helps me see how incredibly lucky I am. I have never had to face such pain or hardship. I am lucky.

I think all of us just need to realize that no matter how hard our lives have been, we are lucky to be alive. We faced the hardships and turmoils we had to face to become who we are.

Loung Ung feels she is lucky to have made it to America, while her sister was left behind in Cambodia.

I feel lucky that I have a living mother and family, while others like Loung Ung had to see terrible things happen to her parents and siblings.

We are lucky, my fellow Xagans, to be here today. We are lucky to have access to the internet and to a modernized society. Even though somtimes we're given the short end of the stick, we are never given the shortest end.

Count yourself lucky.