The perpetuation of greed, war, domination, and trauma will be the end of us.
By ACL Bachara
We did not arrive here alone. We have never been alone. We did not arrive here innocent, and we do not get to pretend we are self-made. We inherit thousands of ancestors—and their responsibility—simply by being born onto this earth. We must decide what kind of ancestors we are going to be.
When I started tracing the lines of my ancestry, I thought I was looking backward. I didn’t expect my deep ancestral exploration to change the way I see the present.
My great-grandfather spent years researching our family ancestry, long before the internet made that kind of work searchable or shareable. He wrote letters, gathered records, and followed paper trails across counties and oceans. By the time he finished, he had traced our line back more than eight generations.
As someone guided by the same patron saint of curiosity, I understand what that kind of devotion requires. It is slow work. Patient work. Loving work.
Now I’ve picked up the reins. With digitized archives and sprawling databases at my fingertips, I’ve been able to extend the map he began—further back, further outward, deeper into the story.
Along the way, I learned that a large portion of my DNA traces back to Great Britain. England, 55%. Scotland, 33%. Ireland, 3%. Whew. Ninety-one percent of the information in the many mes is a basic white woman descended from the British Isles. At first, those numbers felt like they explained something about me. But the more I looked, the less simple it became.
If you go back twelve generations—to your tenth great-grandparents—you have 4,096 direct ancestors. Four thousand and ninety-six lives, decisions, relationships, migrations, and survivals that had to happen for you to exist.
There is no such thing as a self-made person. There never was.
In those thousands of lives, I find contradictions. I find ancestors who came to this land in the 1600s, stepping into what they called a “new world,” while Indigenous people were already living, thriving, and being displaced. I find lines that trace through both sides of the Revolutionary War. Both sides of the Civil War. Almost certainly both sides of the fights for suffrage and civil rights.
History is not a clean inheritance. It is not a story of only the good, or only the just.
I grew up knowing some of that up close. I had grandparents who held deeply racist views. That is part of my inheritance too.
And still, I was also raised by a mother who deliberately widened our world. Mom made sure my sister and I experienced different cultures, different people, different ways of being. She taught us to stay open, to stay curious, to keep learning. We inherit stories. But we do not inherit inevitability.
The deeper I look, the more one myth falls apart completely: the idea that we got here alone. My ancestors did not cross oceans alone.
Think about what that crossing actually was. Weeks on open water, in vessels held together by craft and luck, surrounded by strangers who quickly became something else—neighbors, witnesses, the people who held you when you were sick and didn’t know if you’d survive to see land. They argued, probably. They grieved, definitely. They made decisions together about what to do when things went wrong, because there was no other option and their survival required it.
And when they arrived, the surviving didn’t stop requiring it. They did not clear land alone. They did not build shelter alone. The first winters on this continent nearly killed the people who came here, and the ones who lived did so because of community—including the knowledge and generosity of Indigenous people who did not have to help them and helped them anyway. Before those same systems of “civilization” turned around and took everything.
That contradiction is foundational. Cooperation and dispossession, existing side by side from the very beginning.
The myth of rugged individualism asks us to forget the first part and justify the second. It asks us to believe that the people who “built” this country did it through sheer personal will—as if they arrived alone, worked alone, and succeeded alone. As if the land was empty and waiting. As if the labor that built the infrastructure of this nation appeared from nowhere, cost nothing, and belongs in a footnote.
It is not a myth born from innocence. It is a myth built to protect a story about who deserves credit, and who does not.
And we repeat it. Generation after generation, we repeat it—in policy, in rhetoric, in the stories we tell children about what it means to be American. Repeating the wars. Repeating the displacement. Building new versions of the same hierarchies and calling them something different and acting surprised when they produce the same results.
What gets passed down is not only memory. It is pattern. And pattern, unexamined, becomes fate.
There is another layer to this that I am still learning to hold. When we repeat these cycles, choosing extraction over stewardship and domination over care, we do not only harm each other. We harm the land itself. Wars leave behind more than grief and broken families. They leave poisoned soil, contaminated water, ecosystems that may not recover in our lifetimes or our children’s lifetimes. The logic that makes people expendable makes places expendable too. The same refusal to think in generations that allows us to repeat history allows us to burn through the planet as if there is somewhere else to go when we are done with it.
There isn’t.
We are on the same small marble that our earliest ancestors were on. The same one our tenth great-grandparents crossed oceans to reach. And every cycle we refuse to interrupt, we pass forward to the people who come after us, and to the earth that has to absorb all of it.
The point of learning the patterns is to have the chance to stop repeating them.
If I come from thousands of ancestors, then so does everyone else. Which means this place, this country, has never belonged to one group alone. Not morally. Not historically. Not truthfully.
Unless you are Native to this land, you are the descendant of people who arrived here from somewhere else. Some came generations ago. Some came yesterday. Some came by choice. Some came by force. Some came fleeing violence. None of that makes one life more human than another.
Watching families be torn apart, watching people treated as disposable, watching the same dynamics of fear and control play out again—it feels like we are refusing to learn anything from the past we claim to honor.
These cycles are not abstract. They are happening now.
These are not isolated incidents. Minnesota is one community among many across the United States facing similar tensions. As the city—and the world—watched, Renee Good was shot by an ICE officer in the driver’s seat of her van. Weeks later, Alex Pretti was shot at least ten times in five seconds by a group of federal agents. Two moments where the same machinery of power and disposability grinds forward as it has for centuries.
And then in the same place, the same community, people poured into the streets. Organizing. Showing up for each other across every line that was supposed to divide them. Saying, collectively and without ambiguity: no. Not this. We want something better than this for all of us.
I don’t want to make that sound simple. It isn’t. The grief is real and the anger is real and the people who were killed do not get to come back because their community stood up. There is no redemption arc that makes those losses okay.
But there is something in watching a community refuse to look away and refuse to absorb the harm quietly and move on that feels like the opposite of the myth we were sold. Not rugged individualism. Not every person for themselves. Something older than that, and more honest. The same thing that kept people alive on those boats. The same thing that got people through the first winters.
The recognition that we are not meant to do this alone.
Whether your family has been here ten generations or you arrived yesterday fleeing something I can’t imagine—that recognition belongs to you. This place has always held more than one story. The question is whether we are brave enough, and honest enough, to finally let it.
I still don’t fully understand the people who choose harm. I’ve thought about it a long time and wondered about the kind of person who arrives in the world and spends their precious energy pushing others down, chasing power, accumulating at the expense of everyone around them. A life like that feels endlessly lonely when people are viewed as pawns rather than precious.
Understanding has a way of arriving whether it’s invited or not. I’ve come to see that a lot of harm in the world comes from people who are carrying pain they’ve never looked at directly. Maybe they were hurt young. Maybe just arriving here into a body, into a family and a world that doesn’t come with instructions is harder for some people than others. Maybe some people never find their footing and spend their whole lives trying to make someone else feel as unsteady as they do, perpetuating their pain.
That doesn’t excuse it. I want to be clear about that. But it does remind me that the cycles we’re trying to break didn’t start with villains. They started with people who were also, in some way, lost. And that is where the choice lives.
Because the point of looking back is not to stay stuck there. The point is to recognize the vicious cycles clearly enough that we can choose something different. If thousands of people had to cooperate for me to be here, then cooperation is not weakness. It is the foundation of everything. If harm has been passed down, then it can also be interrupted.
If we have inherited this moment, the beauty and the damage, then we also inherit the responsibility to decide what comes next. I cannot change what my ancestors did.
I can choose how I participate in what continues. That participation happens in the choices I make—how I speak, what I support, what I refuse, how I live. Not perfectly. Not without contradiction. I am, after all, the descendant of people who were both imperfect and full of inconsistency. But deliberately. Consciously. With my eyes open to the patterns I continue or interrupt with every choice I make.
Because I get to decide what kind of ancestor I am going to be.
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