When I was a kid, a friend's wooden glider got lodged into a tree, and I attempted to free it with the toss of a rock. Unfortunately, I had not accounted for the fact that I was standing on an incline, so what I thought was straight up was not. The rock never came close to the glider or even the tree. Instead, it came crashing down on an unintended target, thus shattering two things: the windshield of a Chevy Impala, and the neighborhood record for the most expensive window broken by an eight year-old.

We are all affected by our foundation, whether it is the physical ground on which...