OFF ON A TANGENT I: KARMA
Everyone knows the basic idea behind Karma: if you do something bad, or good, the Universe will respond by making something equally bad or good happen to you. It’s all about balance, and that’s cool, but I vacillate between being a fervent believer and a venomous skeptic. There have been days when I have, say, insulted a friend, even unintentionally, and have later had someone insult me in the exact same manner. That makes me wonder about some invisible Cosmic Avenger flying around dispensing the karmic smackdown that helps keep us aware of our own behavior.
But then I see some thundering anus performing an act of pure meanness that would make the Marquis de Sade puke, and I’m begging, praying, for the Universe to smite this prick with a flaming shit meteor, but no, he goes on his merry way with zero consequences. Perhaps he gets his come-uppance later and I just don’t hear about it, but I think that, since he destroyed someone in public, he should be publicly destroyed himself, don’t you? My instinct is to take matters into my own hands and aim my own verbal vengeance missile at the fucker, but hey, isn’t that Karma’s job? Karma certainly wouldn’t let me get away with shit like that.
I guess I just want to see assholes get their just desserts quickly and efficiently, the same way I seem to get mine. Wouldn’t it be great to see a purse-snatcher grab some old woman’s handbag and race down the street only to get broad-sided by a Fed-Ex truck? Or to have a neo-nazi get blood poisoning from the swastika he just had tattooed on his forehead? Things like this keep me warm at night.
Occasionally you actually do hear true stories of Divine Justice. Recently I heard one about a guy in a New England neighborhood who kept exposing himself to Catholic schoolgirls. One day he did it again, and the irate girls chased him down and pummeled him into the pavement. God, I wish someone had filmed that.
The more I think about it, the more I feel that Karma is indeed biased. If it wasn’t, politicians would be exploding like sticks of dynamite during press conferences. George W. Bush never would have made it through the first three months of his 1st term. As soon as he started rolling back environmental protection laws, that giant Monty Python foot would have fallen from the sky and squashed him like a roach. Man, if stuff like that happened all the time, you’d see politics clean up pretty damn fast.
Ah, well. I can dream, can’t I? Maybe, somehow, we all get what’s coming to us in the end, good and bad. Still, just once I’d like to open the newspaper and see a headline like “Mike Tyson Eaten by New Zealand Cannibals,” wouldn’t you?”