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.