Life is fair
(Willam Blake’s “William Blake’s Urizen as Creator of the Material World, 1794”
For Father’s Day, I’d like to bring up the one phrase I associate with my father: “Life isn’t fair!”
That was a phrase that I bucked against for a lifetime. Generally uttered (seemingly to me with a little too much glee, and possibly even a little schadenfreude) after the thwarting of one or another of my childish desires, such as the wish, when I was about 5, to stay up and watch “The Beverly Hillbillies.” (“Why can’t I stay awake later?” Because you’re too young. “But it’s not fair!” Life isn’t fair, little girl!).
Too young to understand that each of my desires were not equally valid or reasonable, I nevertheless understood this as some idiot phrase he’d picked up somewhere in the world of “grown-ups” and felt inclined to use as an alternative to the equally meaningless “because I say so.” Because it was obvious that life is a concept and can have no determination, fair or unfair. (In kid’s language: “Oh, yeah?“)
Life, when we’re really talking about misfortune, is impartial, sometimes leaning this way or that way by pure luck of the draw. It’s people who aren’t fair. People make other people suffer from drought because of border wars. People get greedy and steal other people’s pensions with impunity, because other people have no compunctions about being paid to get such abusers off the hook. People poison eachother if the FDA or other authority says it’s okay. People love some people, and detest others, sometimes for no particular reason.
If it weren’t for this typically human and irksome agent of chaos in society, manners and diplomacy (and swing dancing) wouldn’t have been invented to smooth it all over. Total honesty is for animals.
So, fathers and fathers-to-be out there, to use the “life isn’t fair” argument when you’re explaining to your brat—er, child—why he or she cannot have his or her every wish completely fulfilled, is another unfairness. Children who believe this become the annoying whiners who use that phrase to explain their own lack of determination. They often become examples of another self-fulfilling belief: “Misery loves company.” But they’ll get the kick in the pants that’s coming to them, because life is fair.
And in case you think I’m playing a “blame game,” let me just add this: if you were mentally lazy enough to believe your father when he said this to you, you have only yourself to blame, dumbass!
Happy Father’s Day!
(And when they say, “But that’s not fair,” just tell them that “Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price.” (Alexander Herzen (1812 – 1870) Russian author, Quoted by Isaiah Berlin in: Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, Introduction (1952; tr. 1960).
