Life Isn’t Fair

“Life isn’t fair.” How often have you heard that? The fact is, no matter what eventual checks and balances Karma has going for it, in the short term it can often be the case that people are treated unfairly or taken advantage of by those who seek an advantage in doing so  whether for monetary gain, prestige, notoriety, or just because they’re narcissistic. There isn’t always a clear, logical cause and effect to why you would be on the receiving end of an injustice. As Alfred said to his employer in “The Dark Knight”, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

You don’t have to look far to see injustice. In New York a woman sues her 12 year old nephew, who’s mother died last year, for breaking her wrist with a hug. Before you judge her, it’s likely that she was forced into this course of action by an insurance company who would not process her medical claim until she pursued the lawsuit, This theory was supported by a person who commented on the story, saying that his brother had to sue their mother for a similar reason.

In America people line up on two sides of an artificial barrier to hurl abuse at each other over politics, guns, welfare, illegal immigration, minimum wage, last year’s Superbowl, etc. Much of this is fuelled by Facebook memes which are either blatant lies that can be disproven with one minute’s worth of research, or extreme opinions representing either the right or the left that seem to beg for an aggressive response. If you dig deeply enough, you’ll find that much of this divisiveness is fuelled by various member of the 1% who are practicing the winning tactic of divide and conquer – keep the common people fighting against each other and they won’t notice how what remains of their money is being funnelled up through various acts of wall-street /banking larceny.

Seemingly Incessant wars continue in various countries. In order to survive people have to flee to other countries such as Ireland, where I live. Many people do not want those refugees, some because they just don’t, but many because we already have homeless people who are sleeping on the street, who will still be on the street when we house the refugees. Meanwhile we are making more people homeless with each passing day, while tens of thousands of homes go unoccupied for a number of reasons. Of course, none of the people I’m referring to can begin to afford to buy or rent those homes at today’s market prices, which is how many of them came to be homeless.

This is the world we live in. We may not have created it, but we have inherited it. We are responsible for it even though we deserve better. It’s up to us to stop the momentum of this moral disintegration and come up with something better. That is an overwhelming proposition, but simply blaming “them” is an exercise in futility.

You might not be able to change the world, but you can change your corner of it, and those changes will ripple out. What changes are you willing to make?