<<I believe we each bear complete existential
responsibility for our being--what we were, are,
and will be. We are each the product of our
decisions .... >>
I won't talk about my daughter's particular case, now, or that of her family.
Let me discuss your belief as regards another individual with whom my daughter has lived. There are many like this young lady.
She is blind and deaf. She is spastic. She has a brain anomaly that causes her to tear at her flesh with her fingernails until it is lacerated and bleeding. She appears to be (how can one be sure?) in pain, as from morning to night she emits cries, screams, moans.
No one knows of what her consciousness consists, or what her "intelligence" might have been, had she not been born blind, deaf and spastic.
Now... let us try to apply your beliefs to her situation.
First, I assume her parents, who visit, should understand that they had it coming, so to speak. That is, "bear responsibility" for their own anguish.
Second, I assume both that this individual, through past decisions of hers (perhaps she was Ilse Koch or Genghis Khan) bears responsibility for her current situation (the one in which she spends her day mostly screaming.) And that she is at present, betwixt and between her moans and cries, undergoing another "test," the grading of which will determine what she "will be." If in her dark, silent, wordless world, she manages to fathom the challenge to which she must rise, and rise to it, perhaps her next incarnation will be pleasanter.
In the meantime, her parents should rest assured that her life, and theirs, are exactly what was coming to them all.
Frighteningly enough, it does happen on occasion that notions as cruel as yours become embodied in actual social systems. I am thinking, of course, of the caste system in India, in which it has been clear to all that the members of the bottom castes -- the sewerworkers, ratcatchers, corpse handlers -- lived out these roles as a result of decisions made in past lives. (How convenient for the administrative class, the merchants, the priests, the warriors, in their beautiful clothing!) |
