Things happen for a reason.

Wrong.

Beep.

That’s one of the worst things a person can possibly say.

Tell that to people born into a country where they’re starving. Tell that to someone who was raped and killed because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Tell that to someone who loved her husband and her children but watched that husband slowly die of cancer. Tell that to the parent of someone hit by a car. Tell that to the victims at the World Trade Center. Tell that to someone helping people randomly while a petty neighbor who won the lottery.

The assumption is that people deserve what they get. That karma, or some sense of reaping what one sows, applies to all human events. There are many who claim that no one gets what they did not warrant, even going into past lives and imagining crimes there. I’ve heard people claim that those born with AIDS wanted it, that their souls before incarnation chose such a life.

And, to be sure, it’s a convenient philosophy. It negates the deep problem of the obvious injustice that surrounds us. It allows us to turn a blind eye and a deaf mouth and a blunted mind to the cries of suffering in the world. If we can turn away from the starving and dying and suffering in Africa, in India, in China, or anywhere in the world, we can turn away from the suffering at home. The same philosophy that justifies inaction against injustice by rewriting that injustice into justice through postulating past lives or metaphysical choices would also require no fire departments, no police, no people giving blood and doing whatever they can to help the thousands dying in the World Trade Center. This insidious philosophy, in a desperate attempt to find cosmic good, requires condemning the best in people.

I’m reminded of Garth Ennis, an Irish comic book writer who, in his Preacher, had an issue in which an Irish boy fighting with the Irish against the English (in the 1616 Easter Rising) was rescued from the fighting by his older brother. Told about the construction of the Titanic by poor laborers who chanted derogatory statements as they hammered nails, the idiotic young boy wonders if that’s why it sunk. His older brother suspects an iceberg.

Things happen for a reason. That’s what Jerry Falwell thought when he said that America deserved the 11 September terrorist attacks for its moral laxity as a nation.

No.

We must, in all good conscience, say no.

And all people falsely convicted of crimes had done other crimes to warrant the conviction. And all the Jews and others killed by the Nazis ... and all the boys who died in the trenches, drafted ... and all ... and all ...

The world may, in fact, work in such a way, metaphysically. But we have no evidence. And we, as anything remotely resembling moral people, must say no. Loudly.

Acknowledging injustice in the world is a difficult necessity to creating justice, and the only alternative is delusion - or at least unethical.

Human beings make justice. Human beings massacre each other. Human beings stand by while others starve. Whatever gods exist, they do not micromanage world affairs. This is not a just world, demonstrably. We must do our best to make it so.

The popular axiom “things happen for a reason” is racist, sexist, classist, and about as horrible as one could get. It endorses the slave trade. It endorses the Holocaust. It endorses mass rape. It endorses genocide. It endorses all the horrors of mankind, including upon yourself and your family.

Yes, things have causes. Like icebergs and bullets. Like cultures and economies. Analyzing this is the hard work of detectives and scholars. But “things happen for a reason” is always used to mean that things have cosmic causation, that the good is always preserved. And the comfort this provides requires the tacit selling of one’s conscience, if not one’s soul.

Yes, sometimes people reap what they sow. I have seen many a person risen to power through scheming have his scheming nature slowly revealed and at last backfire. I have seen many obnoxious people take advantage of others’ good will only to have people, say, refuse to hire him because of a growing acknowledgement of that obnoxiousness. But sometimes the chickens don’t come home to roost. Sometimes the town bully is struck by disease. Sometimes the town saint.

It is us, as human beings, as organisms, who believe in reasons, who read such events as cosmic justice or cosmic injustice. This is the terrible truth that we must face: no matter what metaphysics exist, this is still the case or must be treated as if it were so. We can manufacture reasons all we want, but we do not change these truths.

What we can say is not that things happen for a reason, but that things give us the opportunity to make reasons. What I mean is that events present us the radical opportunity to construct meaning. Martin Luther King’s death was an unjust tragedy, but carrying on his legacy gave to that event a kind of reason. We must, as human beings, recognize the lack of inherent reason in events in order to grant them reason.

It is precisely the lack of reason in the natural order of things that has caused us to carve out governments to protect and improve us, to construct cathedrals and skyscrapers, to educate ourselves, to study the world so as to discern truth and construct devices that have radically improved quality of life around the world.

We are called to take what life deals us as opportunity, as challenge. What matters at the end of the day may not be what happens as much as how we deal with it, how we make good come of ill, how we learn from our mistakes, and how we respond to injustice.

Pretending injustice does not exist, or that it was somehow deserved or, in and of itself, for the best, silences our consciences and negates the very challenge that might redeem the very injustice our superstitious rationalizations seek to comfortably negate.

Looking back upon a life, we can imagine no other course so vividly as that which has transpired, as that which has, however comfortably or not, become the familiar status quo. We thus imagine that every misfortune, every accident, could only have been overall for the best, producing what we know to be ourselves, to whom we are attached no matter our status. In fact, each of our lives have been determined at least as much by chance or others as by ourselves. This trend and this fact combine in the present, in which we are all too inclined to reassure ourselves that whatever misfortune we suffer will lead to a new status quo, a future self who might comfortably look back and find projecting one’s earlier self past a recognized point of derailment.

At its best, “things happen for a reason” recognizes this fact. But even this generous interpretation, sans implications, yet refuses to recognize the present, the weight of its tragedy, and the need to seize the opportunity to steer that future, to craft the new course of one’s life -- since, after all, any course will result in some new status quo, just as fiercely protected by the human mind.

“Things happen for a reason” removes the human need to create justice in this world, to respond to tragedy and the injustice of both nature and human events, even human biology, with active, struggling, striving creative force. Things happen for a reason only in hindsight. We must make that reason, craft without blind apathy a better future, a more learned future, wherein that reason may be discerned, wherein tragedy has led to reason.

Things happen. It is how we deal with them, with the good as well as the bad, that we can control. And while that is no guarantee against mistakes, or future tragedy, it is the only way to judge a life.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

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