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Bad things and good people

I’ve had the privilege in my short life of knowing a few truly good people: humans bordering on the divine; people who, I believed, were inherently good; people who reinforced my belief in the goodness of mankind.

None treated me divinely all of the time, none claimed to be an angel; each was open to the temptation or necessity of wrongdoing.

But the worst things happened to these good people: they lost mothers or fathers at early ages, lost them both in one instance; they were put out of their homes; they were forced to fend for themselves; they suffered through accidents and chronic illness; they lost jobs, were envied and hated and framed; they were knocked off of the summits they had worked so hard all of their lives to reach, to collapse with nothing and no one.

And they, as well as I, were forced to ask: Why do bad things happen to good people?

In The Dark Knight, the latest Batman sequel, it’s a question that arises in the film’s explosive and emotional climax.

The presumed hero, the blonde-haired do-gooder, suffers the worst loss he could ever envisage. And then he is tempted, like Christ was, to renounce his heroism for the riches of vengeance, to go to the other side—a two-faced situation, really, as you will find out in the film.

And, unlike Christ, it pushed him over the edge, literally.

Karma, Christianity and chance

If one believes in karmic existence, then what goes around comes around: Be good and good things will happen to you.

But then what did Akiel Chambers and Sean Luke and Emily Anamunthudo possibly do to deserve their ghastly demise?

Hinduism teaches that we don’t only have one life to live; that, perhaps, in previous lives, they may have done wrong and reaped those consequences in successive lives.

It teaches that one must give in to nature and calamity: observe, and don’t retaliate.

In a slightly similar manner, if one believes in the biblical god, then life operates by design, and reasons and justifications are so mystifying that it is pointless to rally against or question them: all is god’s doing and it is beyond mere man’s comprehension.

But pray hard, sacrifice, do the rituals, and he will reward and take care of you. He poses “challenges” only to “test” your mettle, your belief in and fear of him, and make your resolve stronger.

If art imitates life, though, and one is inclined towards the irreligious, then one may believe Beckett. Nobel Prize-winner Samuel Beckett posits life as random and cruel and perhaps even pointless for man to try to make it any better.

Beckett was fond of St Augustine’s oft-quoted remark: “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do not presume one of the thieves was damned.”

Everything, therefore, is 50-50, a balance that informs the structure of life. Everything is chance, luck, perhaps, maybe. There is no design, there is no predestination, there is no control over external things.

Survival of the fittest

I am not one who believes “things happen for a reason.” I do not believe things happen by design. I believe man is in control of his own destiny, so external things, like the actions of other people and the actions of nature, are the only things beyond his control. It’s how we react to these things where our control comes in.

S--t happens. Companies go bankrupt, rivers overflow their banks, drivers “lose control,” disease is spread by insects and air and water and the soles of feet, illnesses go unnoticed until it is too late, electricity fails at just that moment, pens run out of ink in the exam room, everybody goes AWOL that one critical day, planes fall out of the sky, people get trapped, people get framed, people give in.

I don’t believe there is a natural silver lining to every cloud. But we can make something positive out of something negative and we can stick to our principles and goodness without going over to the other side.

Life is about survival of the fittest. And it is those who are fittest who lead the world and make it a better place. By today’s materialist standards, Christ was a loser for getting crucified for his beliefs. All he needed to do was bow to the man-god and be free.

To survive—to be the fittest—inherently involves overcoming challenges: overcoming all the bad things that happen, no matter how seemingly insurmountable or shattering or heartbreaking. Oprah, Iyanla Vanzant, Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela come to mind. (Why are all these examples of black people?) But one doesn’t have to be famous—or black—to lead, as criterion to be the fittest.

Maybe it’s better for bad things to happen to good people because they are the ones who can learn how to benefit from them, how to come out better and stronger and more resolute in their goodness as a result of them. In this way, the world would have more “fittest” people to survive—and lead, and make the world a better place.

These are the people whom history remembers: not just those at the head of million-man marches or the ones on TV, but also the ones who touch average lives in ways little and big, every day.