“Anything can happen to anybody at any time regardless of merit or worth to society.” Photo: Aldrin Cordova / MPIM
At one time or another, In fact, oftentimes, we get to hear and almost sympathise with some hand up person, the sentiment that “LIFE IS NOT FAIR.” Life is unfair enough, what with accidents, calamities, even catastrophes so that people don’t have to add to its unfairness by their actions, or to excuse what they do or don’t do by tossing off that cop out of a phrase “LIFE ISN’T FAIR.”
Life is unfair in that a sunk ship may kill innocent people and spare its worthless captain and his crew who are the first to get to the lifeboat and food supply. Anything can happen to anybody at any time regardless of merit or worth to society. But precisely because of this we have a special obligation to see to it that fairness works wherever we have the power to make it work. People aren’t mired in poverty because of “LIFE,” no, but because society doesn’t really give a damn to get rid of slums and rotten environments. Politicians even encourage this because more people in the slums translates to more votes for them in exchange for a measly basketball court or a hastily put up “health center” ill-supplied with competent nurses or even paramedics or medicines whose expiry dates are still far off.
The best young people die in wars not because life is unfair, but because the old men who run our countries are more interested in exercising their power and acquiring “glory” than they are in working out some proactive plan to outlaw war as a way of settling national differences.
There are many things we just can’t control in nature so there will always be a kind of BUILT-IN unfairness in the universe. But we don’t have to add to it by being selfish and indifferent and narrow-minded and by simply shrugging off problems we could control instead of just mumbling the mantra “LIFE IS UNFAIR.” The whole idea of fairness is a human one anyway. Animals don’t grumble about it (Remember Walt Whitman poem?), animals don’t lose sleep over it. Nature is beyond good and evil. And I suppose we developed the idea when the first of HOMO SAPIENS realised that life itself was so hard and unpredictable to begin with that we have a responsibility to try to make it easier for one another. Isn’t that actually the moral basis of religion? The ancient Hebrew prophets and the more recent Christians didn’t feel that we should tolerate the same injustices over and over again on the grounds that life is unfair and anybody might die anytime. If science and medicine felt that way, people would still be perishing by the millions from plagues ̶which some people (even those who should have known better) once accepted as “THE WILL OF GOD.” That’s why we’ve promoted laws and reforms and ethical codes (from Hammurabi down to the United Nations Bill of Rights: They can’t make life fair, but they can make it a great deal FAIRER. And that should be enough.
