We Want People To Deserve Their Fate

I think that as human beings we have an enormous fear of the unknown and a fear of the randomness of bad things happening to us. We have to believe that there’s a reason why something bad happened to someone because if they didn’t do anything to deserve it, it makes us feel horribly unsafe.

I first noticed this a couple of years ago when there was a train accident in the town where I worked. Two teenage girls were killed when a train derailed and spilled its load of coal all over main street. The media reported that the girls were sitting near the train tracks on an overpass to main street, but people continued to believe that the girls had been ON the train track. So there was a tremendous lack of compassion or sympathy for their deaths.

Maybe sitting so near the train track wasn’t the best choice but it was a common place for teenagers to hang out late at night. At that age people aren’t making the most rational decisions and I think we’ve all done some slightly irresponsible things that didn’t lead to us getting killed.

These children lost their lives and it seemed like all anyone could do is blame them for their own deaths.

I notice the same effect in the victim blaming that goes on in rape cases. And I see it in the victim blaming that’s going on when young black men lose their lives.

People can feel comfortable and safe as long as they tell themselves that those men did something wrong, broke the law, did something to deserve getting shot. But the truth is that in many of these cases the victims did not do anything that constituted life threatening.

Now, naturally as a Hindu I do believe in the law of action (karma). I believe that what we face in our life is born from seeds sewn in the past. From that perspective in a way we do deserve what happens to us, but we don’t know what we’ve done in the past and we don’t know what others have done. So I don’t think that we can make judgement calls based on it. Regardless of what others have done in their past or what we have done in our past, we all deserve compassion and help for sewing better seeds for the future.

Something horrible and unfair could happen to you at any time because you don’t know everything that your soul’s past holds. Being law abiding, kind, and a perfect human being who never makes any mistakes cannot protect you. So let’s not look down on people who have something tragic happen to them.

Cracked has an article that explains a lot about why we do this.

All I ask is that we stop and consider when we hear about a tragedy. Think about the reaction that we are having in our minds and whether our reaction is coming from a place of compassion or a place of fear for ourselves. The mind wants to make the world feel like a safe place. But it is not.