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It’s Not Fair
It happened more than 25 years ago. We were in Israel for one night to attend the wedding of a friend’s son. During the night, in the hotel where we were staying before returning to London the following day, I experienced extreme chest pains, and I was rushed by ambulance to a Tel Aviv hospital. In the emergency room, the doctor declared that I had suffered a heart attack! Me? I had exercised all my life. The closest I had ever come to smoking was eating a piece of smoked salmon. I kept a careful diet, and I had been on statins for years. ‘It can’t be,’ I said! ‘Genes,’ said the doctor, ‘you can’t argue with genes.’ So, my life changed forever, as it does for all who have been touched by the finger of mortality, and my comfortable hotel bed that night was exchanged for one in an intensive care unit. On either side of me were other heart attack patients.
Before the curtain had been drawn around my bed I had glimpsed the patient on my right – a young man seemingly in his late 40s. Sleeping fitfully, I was awakened by a flurry of running feet and urgent activity followed eventually by an ominous silence. It was clear that my neighbour had passed away. Then his family arrived, and the weeping began. ‘Zeh lo fair, zeh lo fair’ – ‘It’s not fair,’ ‘It’s not fair’ wailed the wife, over and over and over again. Her voice continues to ring in my ears to this day.
She was right. It wasn’t fair. Because guess what, life is not fair.
Where is the fairness in some people being born into loving, caring families, given a privileged head start in life, and others born to parents who abuse and destroy their children? Where is the fairness in some people living long healthy lives and others cut down in their prime? Where is the fairness in the natural catastrophes that occur in the world or when evil prevails over good?
If one believes in a random universe there should be no surprise that life is not fair. Why should it be any other way? But a sense of fairness is embedded in us from earliest years. For those who believe in an ordered and directed universe there is an expectation that the world should be conducted accordingly.
Perhaps the problem is that fairness is a human construct, a human way of interpreting events. In seeking to apply this measure to the events of our lives we are inevitably led into a moral cul-de-sac.
Maybe a more helpful approach is to acknowledge that the world operates by a different measure, a system whose logic we simply do not grasp. Then when things happen that challenge our sense of fairness, the response is not to despair, or to rage against the universe, or to succumb to a crisis of faith.
The response is not to ask why does it happen, but what do I do about it – how should I respond? Then one finds hidden resources of resilience, an outpouring of human good, and with time the realisation that we grow as human beings from even the most awful life events.
