Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person

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While it may not be possible to make life fair for everyone, it is possible for individuals to "tip the balance" in someone else's favor, if only temporarily.

We've taken people in who might otherwise be homeless, enabling them to get themselves back on their feet without having to worry about where they were going to sleep.

We convinced a church to rent one of their properties (a small, two-bedroom home bequeathed by a former congregant) for a dollar a month to a family of four. One of the parents has stage-four cancer.

We're trying to make sure that an elderly couple from another church has enough groceries to get them through each week.

Note that none of these are 'handouts' (well, maybe that last one is), but efforts to keep people from ending up on the streets with nowhere to go and no one to turn to.

Life is not fair but death is.

-The atheist

This isn't about poverty, disability, or anything else. This is the just world fallacy, which is about people who get bad things necessarily having done something to deserve it and people getting good things necessarily having done something to deserve it. It's about as backwards as still believing the sun revolves around the Earth, but it does exist because it's inborn.

I didn't need research to know that it's a terribly unempathetic mindset to look at a victim of rape, robbery, assault, abuse, disease, or anything else and immediately start sizing up how their own behavior might have brought it on them, but I'll read nonetheless.

^^^^THIS^^^^

I had a saying, many years ago when I was in the "freelance social worker" business. "s**t happens. Please consider me the divinely provided toilet paper."

I'm not sure we need to go quite that far. Frankly there are all kinds of people out there who are only concerned with fairness on the level of a 3-year-old child who will be happy to use and abuse you in the interest of them getting what they think is fair. "Tipping the balance" in no way requires you to offer yourself up to those people as a perpetual free lunch buffet.

But, life ain't fair and that is why human decency is required to make society work. You don't have to get all the nonverbals right all the time (or make sure to use the dessert fork). You DO have to realize that s**t happens, realize that sometimes good people who don't deserve the fecal facial get splattered, and be willing to help clean up in the absence of clear and present evidence that you are simply being used.