Sh#t happens. We need a new relationship to tragedy.

I have wanted to blog on this topic for ages, but got inspired to do it now by reading this blog by a Canadian traveling through Europe.

The gist of it is that Europe treats people  like adults who can gauge their own risks and don't need to be protected from every conceivable danger.

This rant is about the seeming inability of people to deal with the fact that the world is not, never has been and never will be a 100% safe place. There are no guarantees. Face it folks, bad stuff happens. Tragedy is part of the human condition.

What drives me nuts is the following script, frequently heard on the news with variations. What are personal tragedies that have no impact on public life doing on the news anyway? But that is another rant. 

Here goes. Loved one dies, in some newsworthy way. Accident, medical mistake, whatever. A devastated survivor is being interviewed. Sob, sniffle, and: the survivor wants a law passed so that "this will never happen again", so that "no other family will have to go through what we are going through", so that "our loved one did not die in vain..."

Now some good comes from this sentiment. There are battles worth fighting, there are laws worth passing. If personal loss provides the energy behind the fight, great. Mothers Against Drunk Drivers is a good example.

But it gets overdone. In particular, the normal desire to keep our children safe is resulting in a generation of greenhouse flowers that is ill prepared for the harsher reality of real life.

At the risk of sounding heartless, as long as the world has both curious toddlers and backyard swimming pools some of the former will drown in the latter. It is sad, it is horrible, but there are only so many safety measures we can take. 

When cyclists become part of the traffic stream, we can expect some of the 'normal' number of traffic fatalities to be cyclists. It is sad, it is horrible, and we definitely want our cities to be designed better. We want to minimize the number of accidents, but we can't make it zero.

I can understand why people in the USA are so eager to sue anyone they can possibly blame. In the absence of a social safety net a legal settlement may be the only way a family can cope with the care for a damaged member. 

Apart from that, part of the need to find blame may be the underlying assumption that life is supposed to be safe. If life does not deliver the goods somebody, somewhere, somehow must be to blame. 

Sorry folks, it ain't necessarily so. For whatever reason, tragedy has always been a part of the human experience. We used to get kicked in the head by horses, now we get car crashes. We used to get epidemics of acute infectious diseases, now we get allergies and cancer. Of course we want to keep striving for the best possible world, but we must acknowledge that perfection is not an option. We must acknowledge that we are not always in control.

I believe children are damaged the most by the need to assign blame in the face of tragedy. Parents are already terrified to let them out of their sight, what with child molesters lurking behind every tree. But to add insult to injury, when a child does get hurt, parents have to deal with finger pointing on top of their grief. Whatever it was that harmed the child, somehow better supervision should have been able to prevent it. This climate may well contribute to the epidemic of hyper vigilance we see around us. 

In my long ago far away childhood the 5 year old brother of my bother's class mate went through the ice under a bridge and drowned. In my class a girl's big brother had been killed in traffic riding his bike at age 8.  These events were discussed as the tragedies they were, but I do not remember anyone suggesting that 5 year olds should not play on the ice with their older siblings, or that 8 year olds should not ride bikes.

There will be other blogs on the topics of risk management and personal responsibility. For now, may I suggest a visit to this great site: http://freerangekids.com

Where was God?

One of the more obnoxious reactions to the tragic school shooting in Connecticut is the meme going around on Facebook that supposedly answers the question: Where was God? Or, how could God allow this to happen?

The T shirt gives the answer: He (this version of the Creator is definitely a a He) is not allowed in schools. 

Ah. Pardon me for thinking it was a good idea to separate public institutions from privately held and not universally shared beliefs. 

I strongly suspect HeShe was in the same place where HeShe is when a USA drone hits a wedding party in Afghanistan. HeShe is on the sidelines, shaking cosmic head, wondering why our species doesn't make better use of its free will.
Besides, where is HeShe during epic natural disasters? 

I am an agnostic, rather than an atheist. One of my favorite quotes is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I practice Reiki. It feels like it works, in a way that suggests a version of The Force is with us. The relationship of such practices to Placebo will be another blog sometime, and I must do one on the need for the Secular Sacred.

But the attitude of believers to prayers with specific requests baffles me. Don't we have enough evidence by now that it doesn't work that way?

A while back my dear Christian friends were praying for a baby who had been born with a heart defect. The baby did well after surgery. This was taken as a sign that God had heard the prayers, and wasn't He wonderful for saving the baby. But no blame was attached to the Deity for not giving the baby a perfect heart to begin with. 

Any positive outcome is taken as proof of God's goodness, but we are supposed to meekly accept all the horrors of the world as His Divine will, not to be questioned. For every earthquake victim who is rescued after days of prayer there must be others praying just as hard who perished in the rubble. Thy Will be done. Fine, but in that case why bother with the petitions in the first place?

Earth is not, and never has been a 100% safe place. As naked apes on a finite and unstable planet we face enough challenges without making each other miserable and without inventing capricious deities who need to be placated. 

In his epic and brilliant novel "The Years of Rice and Salt" Kim Stanley Robinson follows a group of souls through a number of incarnations, Tibetan Buddhist style. At some point the scientist in the group comes to the conclusion that "Any improvement in the tenor of existence will have to be anthropogenic".  Amen.  Folks, the making of a better world is up to us.

I have nothing against people who believe in old religious traditions. Religion seems to act as a magnifier, bringing out either the very best or the very worst in people. Like the girl with the curl on her forehead: when it is good, it is very very good, but when it is bad it is horrid.

I worry when tragedy is blamed on failure to placate a god. It is a small step from there to blaming the people who must have angered the gods. That leads to priests burning heretics and witches alive, or throwing Christians to the lions, or murdering infidels or having a pogrom. Take your pick. 

Meanwhile, I shall continue to try live up to my own motto.
With thanks to Ram Dass, Voltaire and the Dalai Lama:

Be here now. Cultivate the garden. Just be kind.


As said before, any deity for whom that is not good enough I don't want much to do with.