You Don't Deserve This - By Sharon Flood Kasenberg

January, 17, 2010:

To claim this earthquake consequence
seems most devoid of common sense -
I can't believe that God would kill
a people who've done little ill.
Where hurricanes and earthquakes slay
the people don't deserve to pay
while other nations, more corrupt
see no disasters there erupt.
But smugness might occur, it's true
when horrors are not rained on you,
and to your small, judgmental mind
there's cause to what befalls mankind.
And yes, at times it seems that fate
sends misery to those who hate,
but in this case, it must be said,
so many of the hopeless dead
were likewise without hope in life -
impoverished and born to strife.
They battled hunger and disease,
and you, one who enjoys such ease,
can blithely say they earned their plight?
Your heart, and reckoning aren't right.
God did not cause their land to quake.
Your ignorance makes my heart ache.

By Sharon Flood Kasenberg

I remember my outrage when a man in my church congregation stood up and said that the devastating earthquake in Haiti was just another sign of the times, and that God was making good on his promise to cleanse the earth of wickedness before Jesus returned. I wanted to stand up and shout, "How dare you stand there in your nice suit, surrounded by your healthy family and even imply that the people of Haiti deserved this fate!"

I wanted to smack him up the side of the head. But then I looked around, and when I noticed how few had been paying attention to his words, it dawned on me, all at once, that perhaps it isn't so much the rhetoric of fools that is so damaging to society today, but the complacency of those who should be paying attention, and aren't.

So instead of giving in to my anger, I turned over my printed meeting program, grabbed a pencil out of my purse and wrote a poem. Perhaps the pen (or in this case, pencil) really is mightier than the sword. As I wrote I began to feel better - my anger at his words began to abate, and I actually began to feel sorry for him - the speaker of the thoughtless, stupid words that had so enraged me - and thus the last two lines appeared in my printing, almost of their own volition.

Compassion is a difficult concept to grasp, and an even more complicated practice to master.

Blame, on the other hand, is easy. It's easy to think, when a forty year, three pack-a-day smoker dies of cancer, "Well, he kinda deserved it." We might've really liked the guy, but we can explain away his death, and even justify it to ourselves, as the death that he deserved - a suitable consequence for a bad choice he made in life.

We can even take our smugness to the next level, and console ourselves that we'll never suffer a similar fate - after all, our choices were better and therefore we'll die painlessly, in our sleep, at the age of ninety-five.

But what happens to all of our Calvinistic reasoning when the unthinkable happens and we find out that sometimes we all can fall victim to disease, circumstance and tragedy? Some, I know, will continue in their relentless pursuit of  a "reasonable" explanation. Some might remember small things that they did or said and begin to tell themselves that they actually did deserve to get sick, or be raped, or have their house burned down. Maybe they wore a skirt that incited the attack...maybe they cared too much about their nice house and had to be "brought down a peg or two." Maybe their eating habits were just too unhealthy....

"Yup," they'll say, "if this is happening to me then I must deserve it somehow".

Others will bypass the idea of reasonable culpability and try to find a measure of comfort in the notion that if it doesn't kill them it will make them stronger. They'll concentrate on what they "need to learn" from this horrific experience, and in the process continue to subtly blame themselves - the victims.

I'm going to counter some of this negative thinking by reiterating two of my firmest beliefs:
1) Life isn't fair.
2) We learn when we want to learn.

Harold Kushner made me begin to question my naive notions about life being fair when I first read his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People in my late-twenties. I know I've mentioned this book before, but as far as I'm concerned, it should be mandatory reading for all in the entitled first world. To sum it up, people do not always get what they deserve out of life. There isn't, as Kushner put it, "a cosmic vending machine" that rewards us with blessings for every good deed, good choice, or act of kindness that we perform. God cannot give us free will, and then intervene every single time another person's choice has negative consequences for us. And we can't expect that just because we were good and nice most of our lives the universe will reward us with a bill of good health and a hefty bank account. A lot of what happens occurs randomly - there is no real reason why it happened now, or to us. It just did.

S--t happens.

It's understandable that as rational beings we want to find ways to explain away both the bad things, and the good things, that happen to us. We want to believe that our affluence is a reward for hard work and good living, and that if our trials aren't actually deserved somehow, then at least they'll teach us invaluable lessons. "Some good must come out of this," we try to convince ourselves.

But let's go back to Haiti. Did those people deserve lives of poverty? Do poor Haitian children deserve to eat "dirt cookies" while North American children waste nutritional food in favour of gorging on Oreos? Did they deserve to have their humble homes decimated by an earthquake? I refuse to try and rationalize it - or to accept that it was part of an advance plan made by a loving deity.

What lessons did they learn from watching their loved ones die? In a climate where people live in poverty and see the ravages of disease daily, I think they probably understood the value in treasuring those they held dear. What did they learn from suddenly having no shelter? They already knew that the sun is hot - that's why they built roofs to provide shade. They learned that they needed stronger houses (which likely wasn't news to them). How useful is that knowledge anyway, when they don't have the means to build with bricks and steel?

No - I don't believe this sort of tragedy teaches anything new to those who suffer through it, and I don't believe any God would find such a cruel way to reinforce knowledge already gained.

What about the sexual assault victims that we read about right now - prominent in the news because the accused offenders are charismatic celebrities? Do you believe these women"deserved" to be drugged and raped, beaten and choked? Do they deserve to hear that they wanted the "attention" they got, or to daily face ridicule by those who claim that they're (at best) media whores looking to grab five minutes of fame by dragging the reputations of famous men through the muck?

What invaluable lessons will any of these victims learn from the misery they've experienced? Sadly, with the victim blaming mentality that pervades our legal system, they'll only have their preexisting knowledge reinforced, namely that it would have been easier to not speak up, and to leave their attacker free to prey on others.

It is true, that we often emerge stronger for having suffered along the way, but it's simplistic, and a bit self-defeating, to hold to the notion that growth is impossible without misery. I believe that it isn't the tragic circumstance itself that shapes us, but the humility we gain by knowing that such things can happen to us. We learn and grow when we work our way through difficulties because we, in our humbled state, want to learn.

And this is where I'm going to say something that might shock a few people. We don't need horrible things to happen in our lives in order to be humble enough to accept the notion that we might still have huge lessons to learn. We don't actually need to touch the burner ourselves to understand how much it hurt our brother when he touched it. (And we cried when he did, because we didn't like to see him hurt.)

I once had a friend tell me I didn't know much about life. After all, I'd always been a Goody Two-shoes type who'd never tried anything. From where she was standing, my life looked pretty free of traumatic experiences and tragedies. And I won't deny that she was right - in many ways I've been fortunate. But, I explained to her, I had a lot of people in my life, including her, who had suffered through all kinds of experiences and tragedies. I didn't need to stick my hand in the fire to know it was hot - I saw the scars it left on her. We don't all have to learn through personal experience. It isn't necessarily the misery we personally experience that helps us become better people, but our refusal to stand by complacently and tell ourselves that we'll never walk in their shoes; we're better than they are, and thus more entitled to rewards in life by virtue of our stellar choices.

I believe that character isn't built based on what we've suffered, but on whether we learned to show compassion to those whose suffering we witnessed. We don't need to go to jail to learn compassion for criminals - we just need to be humble enough to admit that had the circumstances in our own lives varied slightly, we could be the one on the other side of the bars. When we can see ourselves as the flawed beings we are, we can see just how much more we have to learn. And when we embrace our ignorance we can look to the universe and say, "Teach me. I'm ready to learn now. Don't let me live life so complacently that it takes a disaster to teach me humanity."

We can become humble enough to want to learn even when our lives are running smoothly and there doesn't seem to be a disaster in sight.

I think it all starts with compassion. When we can accept that horrible things just happen, without wasting our energy trying to find ways to reason these miseries into some kind of justification, we free up more of our energy to feel empathy, and when we feel empathy we'll help each other learn and grow by simply being there to support each other, long before the misery starts.

Next time you see somebody suffering, abandon the search for reasonable explanations. Stifle any desire you might have to assess how deserving of this fate they may be. Reject all of the pat platitudes about how much they'll learn and grow from the tragedy they face. If you want to say something to comfort, you might start with four simple words:

You don't deserve this.