Sans Fig Leaf
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"Deserved?"
9 August, 2007
A driver, open can of beer in one hand, decides to pass a bunch of slow moving vehicles on a winding road, and is killed when he crashes head-on into a bus. No one else is seriously injured.
Very few people would disagree that he brought it on himself.
However, few situations in real life are as clear-cut as the accident I just described. Since I based my description on the initial news reports, it's more than slightly possible that the real situation is not as clear-cut as my description.
I remember another case in the news some years ago. I man was camping with his kids. He had had a few beers. One of the kids was injured somehow. I don't recall the details, but it was a serious injury, they were many miles from the nearest hospital, he was the only licensed driver there, they didn't have a cell phone. So he drove. He got the kids safely to medical treatment, but someone at the emergency room smelled the beer on his breath and mentioned it to a police officer who administered a breath-alyzer test. The father was arrested for drunk driving.
Drunk driving is bad. You shouldn't do it.
Letting a kid bleed to death is bad. You shouldn't do it.
Some would argue that since he was the only driver present, he shouldn't have had any beers at all. All right, then consider alternate scenarios. What if the mother had been along and she refrained from drinking, just in case. What if she is the one injured, and she is injured so badly that she can't drive? We could argue more elaborate scenarios until the cows come home, but we would be missing the point.
We are tempted to think of all things in life as simple cases of cause and effect. Do this foolish thing, bad things happen. Do this wise thing, good things happen. It's all need and tidy. In real life, though, nothing happens in isolation. Even if you make nothing but wise decisions, sometimes circumstances outside your control will still result in some bad things happening. A few extremely bad circumstances can overpower a whole lot of small goods things.
Which isn't to say that we shouldn't try to do the right (or wise) thing. Nor am I disavowing my many previous claims that live is what we make of it. I'm just pointing out that life isn't merely what we make of it. Not everything bad that happens to someone is that person's fault--just as some good things happen to each of us when we least deserve them.
Even when the misfortune is deserved, undeserving people can get hurt. That driver who hit the bus almost certainly had people who loved him, who cared for him, and depended on him. He may have brought it on himself, but did they? Does the fact that he made some foolish choices make their grief less intense or their pain less deserving of our compassion?
I don't think so.
--J. R. R. Tolkien
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