Why Me

Whenever we feel  that we're going through unjust pain or agony, sooner or later we'll go through that Why Me feeling. It could be an accident, relationship issue, immigration hassles, job loss, change in physical appearance...anything. In most of these, we don't have much control of circumstances. One of the things people say to comfort us is Things happen for reason. I always had an issue with it, I'll come back to it later.

Let's get through the few types of situations we or others whom we know might face.

If it's Relationship or Divorce, there's a partner in the mix. You can attribute the difficulty to many incidents in the past and the declining compatibility, infidelity, finances etc. It's not like we're being punished by an invisible hand or something.

Then there's this situation of kids being born with incurable ailments. If they're born blind or deaf they might not even know how the other world feels. How a world with vision or sound works and feels. That kid while growing up might understand that he's different from others, but wouldn't know how other world feels. Imagine how hard it would be on parents, they've nobody to blame except for some weird genes or bad luck. But think of dwarfs or people with visible disabilities like polio. It'll be both hard on them and their family. But, there's nothing anybody can do. Fortunately polio is almost eradicated, many thanks to Bill Gates.

Today I get to watch this news about the rise of Iraqi babies being born with birth defects and abnormalities cause of uranium residue from the war. In this case Iraqis know whom to blame, neo-cons and Bush for that unnecessary Iraq war, but the babies might not survive that long. If they get to grow older, they can understand that soldiers didn't target them. It just happened to be that they're born in Iraq and they're victim of the residue in air.

And then there's being at wrong place at wrong time. Like people who got killed in Boston Marathon, Texas fertilizer factory explosion, Sandy Hook school. In all these cases, victims aren't personally targeted. They just happened to be there.

In all the above, no body is specifically profiting by making others suffer. But lately I've been reading about the kind of news where law enforcements incarcerate innocents because of racial profiling or their inability to capture actual culprit.

In this Central Park Jogger incident in 1991, 5 teenagers started their 13 years prison sentence for the rape, but actually they didn't commit that crime. They're all forced by Police to make wrong statements implicating their other friends. Rape victim being white woman, 4 teenagers're black and 1 is Hispanic. This added racial prejudice to this case.

In 1991, New York resident 36 year old David Ranta was convicted of a murder of  a Rabbi. But there's no physical evidence connecting him to the murder. After serving more than 23 years in jail, he's released this month as 58 old, thanks to a Public Defender effort. As the irony goes, Mr. Ranta suffered heart attack after he came out of jail.

And this case from Arizona where an innocent black man Louis C. Taylor served 42 years in jail for an arson crime.He was convicted by an all-white jury. He was exonerated cause of the advances in science, but he wouldn't be able to sue the police. That's the deal he got.

 

As you can see there's a party to blame in all the above cases. Law enforcement trying shortcuts to close the case, over zealous District Attorneys and Jury members who're ill informed or biased. For most of them there wouldn't be any repercussions. But think of all the time these people spent in jail for the crime which they didn't commit, few times they're not even aware of until they're arrested. 

Mr. Taylor spent 42 years in Jail, 42 years! That means he was thrown in jail before I was even born. That time I grew up in India, went to college, moved to US...all this time he was languishing in jail. Their prime age was lost in jail.  If not for this imprisonment, they could've got married, had kids and if lucky had grand kids also.

I can't imagine how many times, these innocent people asked themselves Why Me. That usual cliched line, Things happen for a reason wouldn't help it. How can you reason, when innocents lost 20, 40 years of their life cause of others lack of concern, ignorance and racist prejudice.

All these incidents happened before the existence of private prison industry. You can imagine how many more people are going to jail cause of three strikes law and mandatory sentencing laws. Like many of my other posts, I don't have any answers or suggestions. This is just the sad reality,  result of ignorant voters voting for corrupt politicians and bad ideology mixed with capitalism.

We might try to rule out all the above incidents as something from another generation and those wouldn't happen now. No, they're happening right now, it's the Gitmo. Read this op-ed in NYT, narrated to a lawyer by a prisoner. Even though Bush started this, Obama got blood on his hands. 

We'll never question lawmakers about these as we're all busy with our shitty reality shows and talent shows.