The crap shoot of life

Watching the scenes of devastation following the earthquake in Haiti in January, and the more recent one in Chili, remembering the tsunami that literally swamped southeast Asia at the end of 2004, then the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005, thinking of all the people whose lives were destroyed or traumatized by these events, I think 'Life is such a crap shoot.'

Most of us (i.e., those reading this blog) lucked out with the roll of the dice -- we got born into reasonably middle-class families in the wealthy, safe (if you don't live in the ghettos of some big, mean city) United States of America. If we're old enough we've undoubtedly had to deal with some of the inevitable tragedies of life -- losing parents, siblings, spouses, children, others we love, to death, or something like alcoholism or drug addiction; perhaps wrestling with these problems ourselves, or such things as depression, lengthy job loss, severe financial problems. As we all know if we live past the age of 20, life is hard, wherever you're born, whatever kind of circumstances you're born into.

But for some people life is astoundingly hard, and never lets up. One could be a woman living in Congo, subjected to multiple rapes by soldiers, having your private parts permanently damaged by the abuse. This, of course, is on top of being dirt poor. Or one could be one of the thousands living in the appalling conditions of refugee camps in Darfur and eastern Chad, there after having seen their menfolk tortured and slaughtered, their home villages destroyed, even now subject to rape when outside the camps trying to gather straw or water.

Or one could be an Afghani peasant, caught between the self-serving violence of the Taliban and the 'whoops' attacks of the drones, that seem to be forever hitting civilian targets; this, after having endured war in one form or another for most of the past 20 years...while wanting, of course, nothing other than to be left alone in peace. And obviously I could go on and on. The places whose inhabitants have it incredibly hard are legion.

And then I think of my mother, insisting that God had a plan for me, my brother (of the same religious inclinations), insisting that God wants me to be happy. Presumably, if God has a plan for little ol' insignificant me, then He/It/They (God is not female, or would never have permitted the kind of suffering women have had to endure down through the ages, in virtually all societies) has one, i.e., a plan, for every other person who has ever lived, and is living now, and wants them to be happy, too. But what kind of Plan permits the kind of suffering I mentioned above? Or, perhaps more importantly, how can one take any kind of comfort from a belief in such a Divine Plan? Surely one can do so only if one wears blinders as to the conditions so many people in the world must endure, have endured throughout the history of humans. If you just sit in your middle-class American complacency, enduring the usual slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but nothing truly major, no true catastrophes, then maybe it's possible to believe there is a just God, a merciful God, who loves you and is watching out for you.

Otherwise you have to think you just really lucked out, in where you were born, when, to what parents. The luck of the draw.