Shit happens! I don’t know how many hundreds of times I’ve heard that phrase over the past twenty years or so…but it seems to sum up the resignation that has infected us all about practically everything. It is used to explain the outrageous corruption of politicians, the hideous excesses of war, the inability of regulators to catch people like Madoff before they’ve plucked the chickens clean and the senselessness of kids being killed by stray bullets from gangster shoot-outs. Shit happens! Of course it does and always has but there is some kind of tragic denial that it seems to be happening more than usual and there is this nihilistic notion that there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. It’s as if we’ve fallen backward into that swamp where people believed that god wanted us to suffer so medicine is heresy…And it isn’t as though people don’t want to do something about these pernicious things going on around us…it’s more that people have given up believing that there is anything that can be done. And it’s a short step to “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em” especially when it comes to little frauds or little thefts or cheating on your taxes or running a little scam on insurance companies (after all…who deserves it more than them?).We come to believe that “little” crimes are O.K. as long as we still believe that the “big” ones get dealt with. Yet more and more often we’re being shown that even the biggest crimes are not being dealt with…in fact it seems that the biggest crimes are the ones that are least often prosecuted while the poor idiot who robs the corner store gets fifteen years. Don’t get me wrong…I understand that the fifteen years is not about the corner store. It’s about sending a message that poor people are not allowed to commit crimes in order to buy shoes and drugs. If they were stealing millions to buy homes and yachts and vacations for highly placed pals…it’s really a question of whether they get caught…how much they can afford for lawyers and several other circumstances. There is also the enormous question of whether they actually committed theft at all. If investments go bad…even on a colossal scale….can you call that theft? I mean, you trusted these people with your money and they made some serious mistakes but hey…you know…shit happens!
The trouble with “shit happens” is that eventually people get frustrated to a point where their reaction is one of bottomless rage. Shit happens until people arrive at the conclusion that we need more repression…more police…more and tougher laws…that we have to give up our civil rights for the “greater good” …that we have to elect more “serious” politicians and grant them the authority to get the job done. And if they make a few mistakes…crack a few of the wrong eggs on the way to making the omelette…well..you know…shit happens.
Years ago there were plenty of stories about the evils of city life. The predominant message was that cities were impersonal places where you didn’t know who was living next door. There were countless examples of people being mugged, murdered, raped, left screaming in alleys for help under walls of windows behind which people covered their ears and pretended they didn’t hear. The fact that those stories appeared in media at the time meant that someone was supposed to be outraged…people were, but not enough. And we ended up at “shit happens”.
I don’t want to see more cops on the street. I’m fed up with the taser incidents that kill people while I fully appreciate the kind of terrible circumstances cops find themselves in everyday. I don’t want to see more repressive laws…more fascist rhetoric…more brutalized policies. I’m prepared to accept that a certain amount of shit happens…but I think we all need to wake up and realize that we are each of us responsible for some of it…and cut it out.
Of course…I could be wrong.
Tags: Shit Happens!
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