Running With Scissors

Don't Blame Karma For Your Own Stupidity

In the beginning, God created the Earth. It was green, and blue, and filled with all kinds of weird and interesting critters. This was seen by many as a bold, creative choice, praised by some critics as his masterpiece, while panned by some as a rehash of his more successful Yellow period.

Critics were particularly drawn to Earth's inhabitants—the humans—created by God in his own image, which we believe to be a very narcissistic move on his part.

Humans, as many in the galaxy might know, are rather bizarre-looking creatures that make no particular sense whatsoever. They're very squishy, soft, filled with mostly faulty organs, and constantly needing to feed and sleep in order to function properly. Not to mention their stubby appendixes. They don't even have tentacles. Well, males do have a tentacle, although they're not particularly useful.

Perhaps there's no-one more mad about the design of the human being that human beings themselves. They're constantly yapping about being tall, being small, having a big tentacle, not having a big tentacle, and so on. Humans are never happy about their situation, even if they're immensely wealthy or famous.

In fact, humans not only complain about their design, they complain about everything. They complain about the green paper in their wallet, or about the primitive wheeled box they use to move to the place where they trade their time and energy for the green paper, or why sports team A didn't sport as much as sports team B.

When they feel even a bit threatened, they like to throw around a word that is incredibly tricky to define: fairness.

According to humans, nothing is particularly fair, and the universe is constantly trying to work against them, when in fact, the universe couldn't care less about you. In fact, if you could call the universe right now, it would pick up and say how not that into you it is, and that you haven't even crossed his mind at all. In fact, let's try it. We will give you the Universe's phone number, and you can try it for yourself: (605) 475-6968. Do let us know how it went.

But what is fairness, anyways? Is it not having what you want? Is it equality? The meaning highly depends on what best suits the one who says it. If you stub your toe, is it fair? What if it's in direct response to that one time you lied to your mother about your grades in third grade? Another type of fairness: Justice. But what is justice? Is it fairness? And what does actor Justice Smith has to do with it all?

It is not that humans particularly care about any of that, mind you. They just want to use a heavy-sounding word to throw around when bitching about how Brenda just got the promotion they were striving for. Sadly, the truth is that most of humanity's suffering is a direct cause of their own actions, just like the fact that it wasn't Brenda's fault you lost the promotion, but because you kept reheating fish in the office's microwave.

In that, we believe that the best definition of fairness comes from the Buddhist principle of Karma.

To make a long concept short, Karma is a spiritual principle of cause and effect. Do good, and good things will come to you. Do bad, and bad things will come. It seems like a simple concept to understand, but it gets very complicated as one applies it to real life. Let's take a random subject: Dr. Freak.

He could be called a relatively good person. He always paid his taxes, was ambivalent towards Jehovah's witnesses, and thought pugs were just the cutest little piggies. Yet, his life had been plagued with unfair situations from the moment he was born, when he was mistakenly thought to be a girl and named Leslie Marietta Freak thanks to something about the size of his tentacle.

It set the mood for his entire life, being belittled, bullied, and other disgusting b words by his family, friends, and even his employees. They had taken every penny he had, and every ounce of his dignity. But instead of giving up and resigning life via sudden neck rope, Dr. Freak decided to endure. Life, he thought, owed him big for everything he had to put up with. Surely the universe would not forget about good ol' Leslie.