To folks who believe that poverty and misfortune, or health
and prosperity, have nothing to do with luck and everything to
do with "choices": your belief that one's station or situation
is entirely one's own choice is, frankly, superstitious.
(This was originally written as a response to someone
else -- as public comments on a public entry. I'm not going to
link to that even though it's easy to find, because the point of
posting this in my own space is NOT to send a bunch of supporters
to go argue on my behalf, but to present something I should be
saying to a wider audience ... in a different space. And yes,
I'm aware that I'm saying things that other people have said
better elsewhere. I think it needs saying several more
times.)
You want to believe that you're in control. Our choices do
have some effect, yes ... but people lucky enough to have more
resources (money, health, privilege, location, talent, whatever)
will find that they have more choices, and their choices
have more impact on outcomes than the choices that people with
fewer resources make. You want to believe that you're
safe because you're in control and making all the
"right" choices to keep catastrophe away. You're whistling in
the dark. You're making up "If I just do this then
everything will be okay" superstitions. It's magical thinking,
and all too often it leads to cutting away the very safety net
that's supposed to catch you if/when the bad luck
happens to you anyhow.
It's also pretty insulting. When you say that "it's not luck,
just bad choices," you're implying that I chose to have
a chronic illness that prevents me from doing things that I want
to do and hurts a hell of a lot all the time. ...
(Oh, I know, you're going to say you didn't mean me,
of course, but dammit, that is what you're saying when
you say that poverty is all about choices, not luck. Turning
around and saying, "Oh, but I didn't mean you," is saying
"Everyone like you is [bad-thing], but I don't mean you
of course, just everyone else like you." It's just like saying,
"Women shouldn't vote, they're too irrational," then turning to
your girlfriend and saying, "Present company excepted, of course,
I didn't mean you, you're the exception." It's like
saying, "Black people are so lazy," then turning to your
African-American colleague and saying, "But not you, of course, I
know you work hard." It's like saying, "Christians are
violent, privileged whiners who think that other religions should
be stamped out but complain that they're the ones being
oppressed," then turning to your best friend and saying, "Except
for you; you're not like the rest of them." Great, I'm the
exception because you're my friend but you hold this terrible
opinion of people like me. Just wonderful. Here's the thing:
most of the time people who say things like that will keep saying
them no matter how many Exceptions they meet. No data
are ever "oh maybe I was wrong", all data contrary to what
they've already decided reality has to be, are "just exceptions,
not meaningful".)
... I really liked my job, I liked the work and I
liked my employer; I liked earning my own money and feeling free
to spend it how I wanted, including spending some of it on things
I wanted just for fun, instead of feeling like I have to justify
needing things badly enough to ask someone to buy them
for me (or to not be "wasting" somebody's assistance on
frivolities), and I liked the pride and feeling like I was "one
of the people doing it right" that I got from working a regular
job like our society expects and values. I also liked having the
energy to go out most evenings and weekends if I wanted to, after
working my job, and I liked not being in so much pain all the
time (though I didn't realize what kind of blessing that was
until I lost it). "Your situation or station in life is not one
of luck, but one of choice," huh? What fucking choice did I make
to get sick, and why would I have chosen to throw away all those
things I liked so much? Saying there's no such thing as luck in
front of someone who has experienced random misfortune is
personally offensive. It's offensive, and it's
incorrect. It's also pretty damned mean-spirited. Yes,
someone who is healthy, and wealthy, and born to a supportive
family with the resources to be supportive, and grew up
in a place with decent schools, and is intelligent enough to make
use of all those advantages ... has the option of screwing it all
up. Someone without some or all of those advantages doesn't have
anywhere near as many options for making things work out. And
someone who loses one of those advantages (say health,
for example) loses a lot of options.
I'm not "an exception", I'm an example of the problem
of the universe not-being-fair.
The universe is not fair. You may want it to be -- you
want to be in complete control, to believe that the
Scary Things That Happen To Other People can't happen to you
because you're one of the good people and don't
deserve bad-stuff, but that's naïve and -- as I said
above -- downright superstitious. The universe is not fair, it's
random. Fairness is a human concept, so it is up
to humans to be fair. And that includes taking steps to
compensate for the random unfairness of the universe, not just
failing to do unfair things oneself. By pretending that the
universe is fair, you excuse yourself from being fair
... or even helpful. Which means You Are Not Helping ... and
ultimately you are part of the problem.
(I do believe that God is fair and good, but He apparently
takes a mostly-hands-off approach to day-to-day stuff and lets us
choose whether to act as His tools to make fairness and
compassion happen, or as Satan's tools to allow -- or cause --
suffering to increase. Frankly, I think it's Satan's work to
pretend that bad things never happen to 'good' people
(right-choices people) and therefore no compassion is needed, no
safety net.)
Do choices matter at all? Yes, some choices do affect
outcomes, and some affect the odds of an outcome.
Smoking increases the likelihood of getting lung cancer, but some
people who never made that choice get lung cancer too. Eating too
much meat increases the risk of colon cancer, but some people who
don't make that choice get colon cancer anyhow. Becoming a
firefighter increases the risk of a fatal or disabling on-the-job
injury, but people who try to play it safe get crippled sometimes
as well. Going to school and studying hard makes it more likely
that you'll get a good job later, but when there just aren't
enough jobs to go around, some people who deserve them won't get
them. Being a loyal, hard-working employee is supposed to get you
a nice retirement nest-egg, but when your employer gets bought by
a corporate raider and the pension fund gets plundered, that
careful planning goes out the window. Choice is sometimes a
factor, but Luck is always a factor, even when it's not
the only factor. Bad things do happen to good people, to people
who tried to do all the 'right' things. It's up to us, the
humans, to try to make the outcomes a little less unfair, to try
to help, to set up systems so that when a 'good person' falls --
whether it's you, or a friend, or someone whose lifestyle you
disapprove of, or even someone you really can't see a way to
classify as one of the 'good people' at all! -- there is still
hope, help, maybe even second chances. As a society, we can
afford to do this, to cushion the blows of outrageous fortune.
And if we also cushion the fall for people who did make
bad choices, I don't think that's such a bad thing that it's
worth screwing over all the unlucky people just to avoid possibly
also helping somebody who (*gasp*) doesn't "deserve" it.
There are a lot of 'exceptions'. So many, that they
really aren't exceptional. Even if you happen to have met some
folks who fit your stereotype, unless you are in the business of
counseling those people or a researcher studying them, your
sample is probably too damned small. (Also, how many folks who
receive assistance never mention that to random
strangers or even most acquaintences? Odds are, you're
overlooking most of your sample that doesn't confirm your biases
because you never imagine they could be in that group.) There are
people who do actually study this. They have more
meaningful numbers than your (or my own) haphazard
impressions.
And for crying out loud, I'm not your pet exception; I'm a
counterexample to your assumptions.
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