The Final Post

For my last blog post, I figured I would address the question that has plagued me and will continue to plague me for, in all likelihood, the rest of my life.

Why do the good, the pure, and the innocent suffer? Why do, in the words of Gandalf the Grey, do "many live that deserve death, and some die that deserve life"?

The conclusion that I am forced to draw, is that of the book of Ecclesiastes. We are dust, and what we do is meaningless--we have only the illusion of free will; in truth, we are at the mercy of an absurd and arbitrary universe (or God). Good people have terrible things happen to them, things that they have no control over--whether or not they deserve it or not.

I am confronted with this horror, these horrors.

The horror that my mother has been struck with a mental disease since she was a teenager.

The horror of the bright young man I knew, who felt the need to take his own life.

The horror of thousands of slaughtered children, of good women and men who are taken to the brink of depraved madness for nothing but the whims of power-hungry and hateful fools.

The suffering of humanity, and the ones we love is enough to break the back of Hercules--and yet, I am happy. Why?

Because I choose to suffer, and bear my sufferings. I do not ask for others to appreciate or bear my suffering, nor do I ask for theirs. It is our task, I believe, to shoulder the world we are given, to struggle, to fight back against the darkness, to, as Dylan Thomas penned "rage, rage, against the dying of the light". We must leave the world better than we found it, even if it all falls into meaninglessness. We cannot suffer the machinations of evil humans, the precious time we have cannot be wasted idly allowing the things we do have control over go unquestioned.

I recently read Brave New World again for the 20,000th time. The world of the novel, full of happy, blissfully unaware infant-humans, seems to be one that it is difficult to argue against. Why reject a world without suffering, without pain, disease and unhappiness?

There is one simple thing. Choice. And I'm not talking about the silly "freedom" that is so commonly lauded about in action movies. "Freedom" can be taken away. The only freedom that is truly unalienable, truly untouchable, is the freedom of the human mind to choose how to face given circumstances. Viktor Frankl speaks about this in his book Man's Search For Meaning. He describes Jews in concentration camps that were deprived of everything--except the attitude that they could approach their death. Brave New World offers a world in which that choice has been taken away--the power to make the choice to ignore a preconditioned response is lost.

But back to suffering. Choice is the one weapon we have against the absurdity and evident cruelty of the universe, and it is saddening how often people forget it.

With that, some closure from Mr. Anderson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YC7TMi0l68