Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt, Why me?
Mike from Maine
This is a good, honest question. One of the eternal questions. It’s right up there with: “Why are we here?” or “How come Hillary keeps using Kim Jong-Un’s tailor?” or “If Sunday is the Lord’s day, and Chick-fil-A is the Lord’s chicken, shouldn’t Chick-fil-A stay open on Sundays?”
But I would answer your question with a question: Why not you? Everything happens to someone. And you are someone. Someone special. (Just testing your gag reflex.)
Less glibly, I should add that we often assume that even if ours isn’t the only misfortune in the world, it’s the misfortune that should command the most attention. This is natural, since our personal pain is the pain we have lifetime courtside season tickets to. Perhaps in our less self-centered moments, we look around, see the suffering of friends or family or even perfect strangers, and ask why bad things happen to good people. Though of course, bad things happen to bad people, too. Bad things happen to all people. It’s a hazard of the being-people trade.
Much greater minds than mine have wrestled with the problem of pain. C.S. Lewis wrote an entire book on it, titled, appropriately, The Problem of Pain. Not to swim too deeply into spiritual waters—we try to dog paddle in the shallows around here—but one of Lewis’s many conclusions was that “we can rest contentedly in our sins and our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Maybe Lewis was onto something, even if the nagging question of the seeming randomness of it all still hangs (emphasis on “seeming”). I look around my own circle and, over the last year, have seen good people I know enduring all manner of suffering: premature deaths, disease, broken marriages, financial ruin, the Republican primary season. When I sit with them, I’m relieved when they don’t ask me why these calamities happen. If I could answer them with any certainty, we’d have to rename this column “Ask God” instead of “Ask Matt.” Which probably would be better for traffic.
But perhaps sitting through other people’s suffering is part of the point of it all. Just as we’ll need someone to sit with us when it’s our turn. (One of the safest bets you can make is that we will all get a turn.) Doing so might enrich us as much as it helps the sufferer. It’s an exercise that doesn’t necessarily make us more of anything, but perhaps more desirably, it makes us less: less churlish, less judgmental, less quick to demonize, less of a sonofabitch. Many of the dried-in-cement divisions that have become a way of life for those of us who spend too much time around the stuck-on-full-volume internet during election season—the distinctions we presume make us superior even as we deny those of a different persuasion their full humanity—seem to blur a bit when we practice just the tiniest bit of empathy. So that even if you’re convinced someone has abased themselves in their “Make America Great Again” hat or their “I’m With Her” pantsuit, or if you’re overly concerned with selecting who gets to take up residence in your own personal Basket of Deplorables, why not try understanding them, or even just tolerating them, rather than simply detesting them? We’ve already mastered the art of detesting each other. It doesn’t seem to be working out. Call me a sucker, but I still take the “one nation, under God, indivisible” portion of the Pledge of Allegiance semi-seriously. It seems, lately, as though we have fragmented as a people. Yet I’m not all that interested in living in one of Two Americas. Living in One America—that’s the trick. It’s what makes America, America—the greatest damn country in the history of civilization. (Sue me, I’m biased.)
One of my old friends and favorite writers, Eddie Dean, wrote something a decade-and-a-half ago that has always stuck to me. While he usually writes (beautifully) about roots music and dying white-trash America, he was doing a dialogue with another writer at Slate. In it, he brought up Johnny Cash’s performance at Folsom Prison. I’m going to quote this in its entirety, as it warrants memorizing:
In keeping with the Johnny Cash theme, your question (“why me?”) turns me to one of my own spiritual lodestars, the great Kris Kristofferson, the country singer/cosmic cowboy. Kristofferson got his start in the music business when, while in the Army after completing Ranger School, he landed his helicopter in Johnny Cash’s front yard, handing over his demo tape to make a lasting impression. One of his very best songs is an inversion/extension of the question at hand: “Why me, Lord?”
Yet instead of being an expression of self-pity, it is one of humble gratitude: Why me, Lord/ What have I ever done/ To deserve even one/ Of the pleasures I’ve known. From there, it gets pretty not-safe-for-work/Jesus-centric, though you don’t have to be a Christian to take the ride. Jews or Muslims or even Episcopalians can appreciate the sentiments. Best expressed here, from Kristofferson’s 1999 Austin Sessions:
And what me and my sensei are driving at is this: gratitude—it’s no small thing. It helps us take inventory of our lives. Reminding us not of what is missing, but what we have. Gratitude might be the very best balm for self-pity. Give it a whirl. On some nights, it works even better than whiskey.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
