“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. … In a universe of … blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” —Richard Dawkins
A Fraction of an Inch
Like most children, I was brought up with the concept of fairness. If you eat all your vegetables, you can have dessert. If you misbehave, you will be punished. As a child, you live in a world where every action is met with a fair, just, balanced reaction – poetic justice. Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people.
I cannot remember the first time someone told me “Life is unfair.” Initially, it seems, I must have doubted them. After all, our very civilization is built on fairness – society rewards good deeds and punishes bad ones. It was not until recently I realized that the artificial justice we create only extends so far.
Football is, in essence, a child’s game. When I was in third grade, the movie Little Giants came out. It was about a group of ragtag youngsters who showed great heroism on the football field. I was inspired – I wanted to be a Little Giant. I can remember pulling on my snow pants, adjusting my mittens, and going out to play football in the snow during recess. We would tackle each other and laugh – there was never a sense of danger. We never felt like we were taking huge risks. Games of high stakes, like war and stocks and gambling, were adult games. Children’s games, like tic-tac-toe and tag and football, didn’t involve adult consequences. This is how children think. They are sheltered for as long as possible, but eventually, every child is forced to confront the myths they have been so comfortable with.
Earlier this year, a high school football player named Anthony Salmon snapped his neck making a tackle during a football game. He was paralyzed from the waist down, and doctors were doubtful he would ever walk again. I’ve watched the grainy footage of the game replayed over and over on TV, and I still bite my lip whenever I see it. I was a football player, too. Every autumn for the previous seven years, I would suit up after school and vent my frustration on the field. Football was my outlet for everything that had aggravated me during the day; it was the only place I had found where primal violence was not just tolerated, but encouraged.
It was this year that I quit football; I had seen too many friends of mine get hurt, everything from broken arms and legs to concussions. One friend I knew blamed football for ruining everything else for him. His injuries had kept him from being able to play other sports. For months, he could not move around without the aid of a brace, thanks to a devastating leg injury. I had undergone hand surgery during ninth grade because of a football accident. Still, football had become a part of me – when you are 16, seven years has even more gravity than it would for an older person. After much deliberation, I had deemed the sport too dangerous, and severed my ties with it. I still miss the rush of playing sometimes, but more now than ever, I do not regret the choice I made. In a sick way, Anthony Salmon’s accident vindicated me. It was something horribly tangible, something I could point to and say, “This is what can happen.”
Anthony Salmon’s tragedy made me wonder how something like this could happen in a world governed totally by fairness. I searched for reasons why he deserved his fate – and found none. By all accounts, he was a good kid, a competent football player; his form in making the tackle had been sound. It was just a freak accident – a fraction of an inch one-way or the other, and he might have been fine.
How was I so different from him? Reversing my position and his was so easy. No doubt I had made similar tackles countless times. Why was he paralyzed instead of me? A simple twist of fate was all it would require. When I told my coach I was quitting, he swore at me. Maybe Anthony Salmon thought about quitting too. Maybe he let his coach, his family, and his friends, persuade him to keep playing football.
This is by no means an isolated incident. Unfairness is all around us. In his book, Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer discussed a few stories about former mountaineer Scott Fischer. Fischer was a renowned daredevil; in one instance, he was racing two far more qualified climbers up an icefall in Utah, when he slipped and fell over 100 feet to the ground. Fischer suffered no serious injuries. Just a few years later, Fischer was on the other side of the coin. He was a part of the most disastrous Mount Everest expedition ever, where he was killed trying to save the lives of other mountaineers.
He had been extremely careless and prideful, and had escaped unscathed. Committing an act of total selflessness, he was killed. The poetic justice that movies and television show us is not real. Society is built on a fear of justice; but there are some things that are beyond our control, our justice.
Looking at Salmon’s accident rationally, it seemed reasonable enough. Two people collide at a certain angle, and the spinal cord is unable to withstand the pressure. But when I thought about it, I could not understand – there had to be a reason for it. Things could not just happen without reason; that was not fair. But it happened, and there was no way to deny it. And it will happen again, at random. Eventually, tragedy will happen to me, because that is the world we live in.
Disillusioned, I looked at society. If there was no fate, no reason, no judgment, what was holding the world together? Our laws alone could not keep order intact. How can society survive if we are not all accountable for our actions?
I came to the realization that, while bad things will happen to good people, it is our personal justice that keeps us in line. I feel right and wrong, and that is not arbitrary. That is something I control. In his essay on “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson discusses personal justice as the “law of consciousness.” Emerson understands that we cannot command any outside forces, but says that by following our moral compass, we will find reason in our actions, and that this is the only way to be at peace with one’s self. Conscience guides us where the judicial system fails us. We just have to accept whatever happens, painful as it may be, knowing ourselves that the concept of fairness is limited to the choices we make.
It is a bleak reality, a world without natural justice. There is no good or evil, no fair or unfair, no mighty shield that prevents bad things from happening to good people. No cosmic explanation for Anthony Salmon. We cannot rely on the kindness of the universe. Instead, it is only the justice we create for ourselves – our morals, our ethics, our sense of good and evil – which sustains us. There is no justice but our own that can cover a fraction of an inch.