History brought us here.

By no choice of our own the events of the last couple of million years have conspired to bring us all to the point at which we presently find ourselves.

Even at this moment, as you sit before an ether blue screen created by billions of atoms giving off the most minuscule amounts of photon energy or hold in your hand a parchment that is the product of perhaps a century of photosynthesis by some unknown tree in an ancient forest, you are beholden to the past.

Unfortunately, the actions of our species have not always been noble. Indeed, the greed and avarice of mankind has written some pretty dark chapters for us -- or perhaps better said, "into us." And no matter how hard we try to slip out from beneath the confining weight of their influence we find ourselves trapped and struggling and laboring for air.

Consider the legacy of African slavery in the British Colonies that would one day become these United States of America. We can no more escape the reality of this wretched past than we can slip our own skin. It is part of us -- an economic and social reality against which anyone who happens to possess a bit more epidermal pigment than not must struggle.

But must we be conscripted to a stereotypical reaction to such a past?

The answer seems to be, only to the degree that we wish it upon ourselves.

It has been interesting to watch the unbiased reaction of my children to the differences among us that we refer to as "race." As my oldest son George experiences a widening world around him, meeting new friends at school, he often comes home and describes different aspects of their persons and personalities to us. Several of George's new-found friends are of African descent, but he has never used skin color to describe them unless he goes into detail and wants us to know what they look like. Skin color is just that -- a physical trait bearing no relation to any other traits in his mind. People are either "dark skinned" or "light skinned" and that is that.

But history will surely catch him one day and plant the full-grown tree of past wrongs in the untouched field of his memory. Its branches will be suspicion and fear and preconception and the wary distance that in many ways is a sort of "unconscious prejudice."

Friends will be judged and denied inalienable rights because they are black. Others will be threatened and accused falsely of denying the same because they are white.The cycle of racial prejudice will surely continue and other biases will assault his view of the world around him.

I mourn the inevitability of such intrusions on the beauty of his young heart.

Lately I have considered the notion that we are but one generation away from solving such problems. That if we could somehow start fresh and new with everyone born from this day forward as being somehow released from the cold boney grip of the past, we could create a world free of this and other historically supported ills.

We are told that God tried it once -- finding one good man and wiping out the rest. It is assumed that he felt Noah's good heart might sufficiently influence those to come. It proved to be a total failure. The creation found its way back to its previous way of thinking and doing things. And probably much faster than even God himself suspected it would.

There's no reason to think that we would do otherwise today.

But perhaps an answer is closer than we might imagine. And perhaps it, too, comes as demonstrated by our very creator in the offering of himself in the kind of unconditional forgiveness that knows no bounds and recognizes nothing of our fallen past.

Is it possible for the human heart to emulate such forgiveness?

At times it appears so, but never on the scale and with the collective force that might somehow permanently overcome the centuries of injustice and hate among different races and ethnic groups.

Rather it would appear that our only hope is by a slow and steady process whereby one heart at a time comes to new understandings through the particular circumstances and events of our own lives.

And not a little bit of grace.

The next time you feel that stereotypical judgment rising up within you, or even the joke that offers the cheap laugh at another's expense, try and remember that such is the material by which our collective freedom from prejudice is lengthened.

And by which others support far more radical views of intolerance.

If hearts need to change -- let us start with our own.