No Grades

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There's a line of narration in this trailer for The Haunting of Connecticut (Lionsgate, 3.27) that drives me batty. Virginia Madsen talks about how her family, dealing with a major illness situation, was "just a regular family like anyone else...we didn't ask for this and we didn't deserve it." In other words, you deserve what happens to you. Which means, following her logic, that some people out there do deserve to get hit with some form of tragedy. Some do, some don't.

What a clueless and pathetic way to assess life and fate and the whole magillah.

"We didn't deserve it" presumes there's some kind of Godly accounting going on all the time that takes a measure of everyone's moral and ethical worth, and that all the good and positive things you're doing and have done are being tallied and evaluated and that you're basically getting graded, like in school. The offshoot is that morally good people with "good grades" deserve and will generally get a better life with more or less favoring winds, and that bad people and their selfish habits deserve a difficult, trouble-plagued one because they're living the wrong way and have made their own bed.

Well, I believe that losers do create their own issues and create their own karma, but there are no guarantees of fairness or clear-sailing for even the best of us. The good people don't get "good grade" passes that help them avoid awful fates. Anybody can get hit with some horrible tragedy (read about the people who were on that plane that crashed in Buffalo), and when it happens it has nothing to do with their "grades" or their karma or anything. I despise people who cling to contrary Sunday-school beliefs. Whenever I hear "I deserve this" or "I deserve that," it's like chalk on the blackboard.

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Posted by Jeffrey Wells on February 16, 2009 at 3:54 PM

comment #1

nemo says ...

About 4 years I was accompanying my wife to her cancer chemotherapy sessions every 2 weeks, which left her prostrate with nausea for 3 or 4 days after every session. At one of these sessions I heard the most nauseating sentiment from the father of a woman receiving chemotherapy next to us.

He said in a sickeningly sweet voice, "You'll recover because we're good people."

What the hell does that mean? That people who don't recover are bad people? That God only lets bad things happen to bad people?

Maybe his daughter and my wife, who were both in their 40s, got cancer in the first place because they were bad people.

I had to go outdoors and walk around the parking lot for a while to keep myself from going over and pulling this self-congratulating old idiot up by his collar and slapping him silly.

I am non-religious, but I sure know enough about Catholicism to know this sentiment is antithetical to any adult form of Christianity.

The Book of Job is all about this subject. This fool was talking exactly like Job's self-satisfied "friends" who told Job he must of done something wrong to make God treat him this way. It's all about telling yourself your personal dumb luck so far in life is something you've "earned" from God. It ain't Jewish, it ain't Christian. It's pure stupid.

Posted by nemo at February 16, 2009 5:01 PM

comment #2

hunterd says ...

I believe the idiocy you are referring to is called "Karma" and even if it's dumb to you, over 1 billion people follow it.

Posted by hunterd at February 16, 2009 5:13 PM

comment #3

Sabina E says ...

oh yes... I'm with you, Wells. that's also one of my biggest pet peeves.

as a Muslim, I've heard ignorant remarks coming from Muslims saying that people "deserved" those deadly earthquakes in in Turkey some years ago, because since Turkey is a very secular nation, so they deserve it!

@ Nemo: wow, that's pretty shitty what that self-righteous moron said to your wife. I hope she's okay now though.

Posted by Sabina E at February 16, 2009 5:21 PM

comment #4

Sabina E says ...

Wells, to be fair, the "karma" you speak of has been watered down with New Age, Western, Judeo-Christian bullshit, that original meaning of KARMA has lost its true, original meaning.

Posted by Sabina E at February 16, 2009 5:24 PM

comment #5

62Lincoln says ...

"We didn't deserve it."? Perhaps just lazy writing?

Posted by 62Lincoln at February 16, 2009 5:49 PM

comment #6

nemo says ...

"@ Nemo: wow, that's pretty shitty what that self-righteous moron said to your wife. I hope she's okay now though."

Thanks, but he said it to his daughter was receiving chemotherapy in a bed a few yard from my wife. But hell, it's a shitty stupid thing to say to anyone who's receiving cancer treatment. I don't think it occurred to him that he was implying to his 45-year-old daughter that if she doesn't pull through, it's her own fault. Or that he was implying that to the rest of us who were with our own relatives in the same room.

My wife finished cancer therapy 4 and a half years ago, so it appears to be a full recovery.

My father was diagnosed with cancer a week after my wife was diagnosed -- pancreatic cancer, the same as Patrick Swayze, not the less deadly form Steve Jobs has. My father was gone within 8 months. A friend of my father's survived 3 years with pancreatic cancer, but that is highly unusual.

Life choices can make a difference sometimes -- with the stress on "sometimes" -- in illness and recovery. I have no doubt some bad choices contributed to my brother's early death. But those are practical choices that influence your health, not moral choices that earn you favor or disfavor in the eyes of God or the universe or whatever.

There is a hell of lot of illness and death that is still beyond any form of human influence, even in modern America. It's mostly dumb luck. A roll of the dice.

Besides the Book of Job, Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor is also good on the subject of myths that implicitly place shame and guilt on the sick themselves for causing their own illness.

Posted by nemo at February 16, 2009 5:52 PM

comment #7

62Lincoln says ...

Nemo, Godspeed to you for what you have suffered. Regarding the old man and his daughter, maybe he deserves a break. He's at the bedside of his child, watching perhaps her spiral towards death. He might not be a wordsmith or a deep thinker, and simply uttered the only encouragement he could muster. I'm not excusing the substance of his words, just the context in which they were spoken. I sure as hell wouldn't want my every word parsed, especially in that situation. In my case, my parents died within 7 weeks of one another. I was the primary caregiver, while attempting to function in my newly-promoted position within a major multinational. I know I didn't do a good job at any of it, but tried to give my all. And I certainly wouldn't want a specific moment to be held up to me for judgement - I'm sure I would fail the test.

Posted by 62Lincoln at February 16, 2009 6:23 PM

comment #8

nemo says ...

62Lincoln, you have a good point. He probably was struggling to stay hopeful. I know what that struggle is like. But if that statement reflected anything about what he believed, he was choosing a poor path to hope.

Maybe that's what this movie is about. When a devastating illness hits, especially someone who is relatively young, there is a tendency to say why me? Why us? What did we do to deserve this?

That is a common impulse, as old as mankind. It's in the Book of Job. But it is a destructive and childish way to think about tragedy.

Your struggle up to your parents' deaths is familiar to me. During the past 5 years I am the only person in my family over the age of 40 who has not been hit with death or devastating illness. I've had to take on some large unexpected responsibilities while my job became more challenging, and the results have not always been a good I had hoped for.

My brother died in messy circumstances without a will, and as his state-appointed executor, I became the target of some pretty bad behavior on the part of some people in our family, his ex-girlfriend, and some of his friends. I also had to fire an attorney and an accountant from his estate because of poor performance. Tragedy does not always bring out the best in people.

Posted by nemo at February 16, 2009 6:49 PM

comment #9

CitizenKanedforChewingGum says ...

My condolences in both of those situations, Nemo...surviving is obviously preferable to dying, but even in the case of the former, it can be a very rough go when a loved one suffers (but ultimately all sorts of redeeming if they pull through).

Nice post, Wells. I am absolutely with you 100% on this.

On a related note, I have a old friend who had a habit of justifying things with the line, "everything happens for a reason." I thought that was more of a product of being young and naive (I knew him in college), but several years later, he's still saying this.

I mean, I respect everyone's freedom of religious choice (or like me, lack thereof)...but I think I can pretty safely say, "no, not everything happens for a reason." I'd even go so far as to say almost nothing happens for a reason, but that's possibly just my own inner nihilism showing through.

And if everything is happening for a reason? Someone's got some serious 'splaining to do.

Posted by CitizenKanedforChewingGum at February 16, 2009 6:59 PM

comment #10