by R Marie Taylor

Created on: January 29, 2008

"Your daddy was a Good Man!" ... We looked on in horrified amazement as a drunken, pockmarked prostitute laid a $5 bill on the kitchen table in the house that our family had gathered in, so that we could figure out how were were going to pay to have my abusive, alcoholic father put in the ground - after he had the misfortune to die without insurance.

There was profound silence in a room full of people as she sobbed the truly pitiful story about how the money had come from a trick she had turned in a nearby alleyway in his 'honor'... this was her contribution to the fund raising effort. She offered to go out and get more, but somebody managed to say "No thank you..."

Until that moment when that prostitute walked in wearing a black plastic micro skirt, and a teeny tiny halter top over her bony chest, with tears of drunken anguish streaming down her pock-marked face, I honestly thought that I had seen just about everything in life.

But we all stared in wide-eyed, open mouth amazement as this little scene played itself out.

I am sure that this was one of those moments that I would remember, even if I lost all my memories in the deepest stages of Alzheimer's.

After her dramatic entrance and exit which consisted of unabashed crying and weaving slightly on her high heels, we all stared at the $5 bill that nobody in the room wanted to touch after she'd left. Then somebody started laughing, and he set the whole room off. We laughed until we cried knowing that daddy would have loved to see that little tart taking up space with the older 'respectable' women of the family. (You know... the good people)

I think she may have been one of the few people in the world who saw my daddy as a 'good' man, but he fit her criteria as such.

Now as to the article title "Why bad things can happen to GOOD people" I contend that Good, just like Beauty... is in the eye of the beholder. And I also think that a good person to some people is an Infidel to others.

Therefore, since there can be no clear cut definition of what a 'Good' person is, bad things happen to everybody.

While I'm on the subject, there are some people who excel at appearing to be Good in the public eye, but they're actually rotten to the core. With the right 'appearance' of goodness, some folks may be as evil as they want to be - with 15 undiscovered dead bodies buried in their backyard, but when THEY die, sure enough some people will be wondering... "Why.... why do bad things have to happen to good people?"

This is a fact of life: If you go anywhere, then there's a possibility that a gunman will show up at the school, restaurant, theater... and start shooting people. You can be pretty sure that he won't take the time to find out who is a 'good' person and therefore exempt from getting shot. Bad things can happen to anybody.

If you have a body, then chances are it will get sick, perhaps terminally ill, long before you're old enough to die of natural causes. This can happen to anybody.

In fact to ask why it has to happen to 'good' people, can lead one to infer that bad things should only happen to 'bad' people. That seems like the most arrogant assumption anyone could ever make.

In my mind, we All have the right to be happy and to live a full life - until it's our natural time to go... And that's true, whether the people around us consider us to be good or bad.

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So, in order to properly answer the question "Why bad things can happen to good people" we must first define and agree on exactly what a good person is. That's probably something the philosophers will need to figure out over the next few hundred years.

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