There ought to be a Department of Things that People Can't Help

Like: Alcoholism. Deafness. Blindness. Sexual Orientation. Think: of the number of people who are  and always have been alcoholics--my guesstimate of their numbers is maybe ten per cent of all Northern Europeans, ever; of their having existed/subsisted so long without their knowing, quite, that they were alcoholics, and without society in general's quite realizing what alcoholics were, although, historically, it made accommodation for them (the after-dinner drunkenness of which Queen Victoria, say, for example, famously disliked).

I give thanks daily that I am not an alcoholic, knowing that, if I were an alcoholic, there would have been nothing I could have done to prevent my being one.