CAUSE AND EFFECT

I think we want things to be cause and effect. If we do _________, then _________ will happen. If we eat healthy and exercise, we won’t get cancer. If she works hard and wants it bad enough, she’ll achieve that dream. If he obeys the cops, he won’t get shot.

The thing is, the world is broken. It just is. I believe we have a distinctly American view of how things “should” work. But if we zoom out of our bubble and look at the world, bad things happen all the time. No cause and effect. Babies get cancer. The girl never achieves that dream. The man gets shot trying to do the right thing.

I see so many posts and responses that generalize groups of humans because we WANT there to be order. We want there to be a reason. We want the shooter to be an extremist, or have a mental disorder, or something that makes the bad thing make sense. We want the man who was shot during a traffic stop to be disorderly or on drugs. We want to be able to say “THIS IS WHY THIS HAPPENED!”

I saw a certain “yes and amen” post just yesterday. If you don’t know what that is, you must not know anyone Christian or southern. Anyways, the post was an article about an African American man who was pulled over for a headlight. To summarize, he was carrying a gun that he was licensed to carry. And…

Everything went fine.

The post was saying “See? Look! It’s possible! Just be respectful and obey the police right? CAUSE AND EFFECT.”

But then, I’ve also watched a video of an officer gunning down an unarmed African American man in the back as he was running away.

The world is gray. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. Certainly there are consequences for our actions, but sometimes, things just suck. I’m not saying to stop searching for meaning or a reason, or to stop looking for correlations to try to prevent things from happening again. I’m saying that you can’t negate someone’s actual experience because you want a reason.

People are more than just a part of a grouping they belong to. They are individuals with unique experiences and relationships and encounters.