By Way of Introduction

You can lead a horse to the polls, but you can't make him vote. They would have to modify the booth to accommodate his horse shape.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

A Charmed Life

I was just reading an(other) article about a school shooting, this one at Florida State University. In this case only the shooter was killed, at least as of this writing. The perpetrator had been posting about things religious and also about his theory that the government is reading our minds, etc., which begs the question: If the government is reading your mind, don't you suppose they'd know you were about to go full Postal and shoot up a library? (Assuming we're still allowed to reference "going postal.")

But here's what really stuck with me:

According to a USA Today piece on the shooting, Jason Derfuss, assumed to be a student at FSU, was near the shooter when he opened fire, not realizing until later that one of his books took a bullet for him.

 "He was about five feet from me, but he hit my books. I assumed I wasn't a target, I assumed I was fine. The truth is I was almost killed tonight and God intervened."

Or maybe it was Tolstoy's wordiness.

We've all heard sports figures thanking their deity when they perform well, and we kind of shrug it off, even if we aren't religiously inclined. It seems harmless enough, even funny. As if a god that supposedly lets us live our lives unhindered while exercising our him-given free will would step in now and again to help some dipshit throw a ball, catch a ball, hit a ball, etc., but not to stop millions from starving, dying of disease, or being murdered.

But then somebody makes the kind of statement that Mr. Derfuss made and people kind of nod. "I can see that. God must have special plans for this kid. It just wasn't his time."

No whammies, no whammies, no whammies...
Bullshit. I call shenanigans. I understand the feeling of a charmed existence, as I too have had near misses in my life. There was the car accident, there were the two times I had guns pointed at me, there was the time at the mall when someone started shooting only twenty or so feet from me, bullets going all over the damn place. I felt lucky, charmed, maybe even blessed. But I grew out of those feelings, as the problems with such sentiments are many: Please go tell the parents of the Sandy Hook victims that God just didn't see the benefit in intervening on behalf of their children. Tell the spouses and children of all the military casualties that God was too busy honing a child-beating Adrian Petersen's running skills to stop the slaughter.

You see the problem with being "blessed?" The law of opposites comes into play. If you're blessed, then necessarily all the people who didn't survive the (fill-in-the-blank) shooting were damned. "That was their purpose here on Earth, to die a dog's death at the hands of some crazed asshole." Doesn't sound very nice when you put it that way. How about: "Your child/spouse/parent simply wasn't that important." Still kind of nasty. "God's plan involved them only peripherally. Hope you hadn't gotten too attached."

None of those are really any good. So maybe we should just fall back on the old stand-by:

"Your puny human mind couldn't possibly fathom the vast greatness of His plan."

Right. Got it.