Sadness

Fair warning, everyone, this post is gonna bum you out.  I'm not sorry.

Bill was a 61-year-old high school chemistry teacher.  Years ago, I was his student.  He spent extra time with his students and tried to get them to care about science.  He cared about the environment.  He cared about nutrition.  He cared about his students.  He rode a bicycle.  He was involved in the community.  He occasionally got annoyed, forgot things, made mistakes, but overall he was a good man, and a damn good chemistry teacher.

Harambe was a 450-pound western lowland gorilla.  He lived in the Cincinnati zoo.  Lots of people came to see him.  I didn't know him personally, but from what I've heard, he was a pretty normal gorilla.  He turned 17 last Friday.

Six days before Bill retired after a long career of teaching, he was struck by a speeding car.  The day after Harambe's 17th birthday, a child fell into the gorilla enclosure.  Because the child was in danger, zookeepers made the difficult decision to kill Harambe to save the life of the child.  Bill and Harambe died within two days of each other.

My chemistry teacher's death saddens me. It also breaks my heart that the gorilla had to be shot. These events make me feel very strong emotions. Negative ones. The injustice of a great teacher dying just before retirement. There's the fear of what could have happened to the child at the zoo. There's the uncertainty and confusion of both events. The unknown of what might have happened under different circumstances. There's anger at the decision of the zookeepers. Anger at the parents for not being more responsible. Anger at the driver. Anger at the unfairness of it all.

Humans feel things. We are incredibly empathetic. In the case of my chemistry teacher, we empathize with him, his students, his family, and, if you're especially conscientious, the driver. At the zoo, we empathize with the child, the parents, the zookeepers, and the gorilla.
These are stories in which those who are punished the most are the least deserving.  There are other such examples everywhere, easy to see and more extreme.  Poverty.  Hunger.  Disasters.  Wars.  Genocides.  They pain us.

Another thing humans do is assign meaning to everything.  We long for the world to be just.  We desperately want all of the evil and its associated emotions to mean something. We want the bad things to be somebody's fault. We want death not to be the end. We want the righteous to be rewarded and the wicked to be punished. We want every question to be answerable.  So if we don't have an answer, we make one up that satisfies us.  We do this because it makes us feel better. If we can find the thorn, we can pull it out. If the bad things in the world are caused by something I can point to, then I will feel less sad.

So we point to speeding drivers, negligent enclosure designers, irresponsible parents, hasty zookeepers, and God to take the blame.  It seems that the general consensus, if you believe everything you read on Facebook, is that the Christian God caused Bill's death, and the child's mother caused Harambe's.

Here's what I think, and I could be wrong. Sometimes, bad things happen for no reason at all, and it isn't anybody's fault.   Sometimes, bad things are somebody's fault, but the innocent still suffer disproportionately.  These events can make us sad, and angry, and confused, and we're right to feel all of those things because that's what it means to be human.  We should avoid making up stories about how fair the world really is, in order to get out of grieving a death.  Doing so will not actually make the world fair, and it cheapens that life.

I was going to apologize for the tone of this post.  After all, nobody likes to feel sad.  But then I realized, that would be rather inconsistent.  I'm not sorry.  I totally did it on purpose.  I wrote this because I feel sad and I want you to feel sad, because you're an empathetic human, and the whole point was to show how sadness isn't something we should run away from, be ashamed of, or suppress.  Empathy is something you should be proud of.  If the suffering and injustice in the world pisses you off, that means you are a moral being.  You can either attempt to lessen suffering, or attempt to explain it away.  So it's okay to be sad for a while.  It's okay to have questions that can't be answered.  At the end of it, you come out better for having the courage to face the world as it is.

Until next time,

Meliores Te