A huge hurdle for anybody trying to do radical work the United States is overcoming the deep-seated belief Americans of all stripes have that bad things only happen to those who did something to deserve it.

This sort of “Calvinism persevering” even within secular contexts mainly is so that they (the ones believing it) don’t have to worry about something bad happening to them because obviously they’re good and don’t deserve it. But a knock-on effect is that if you’re the one suffering, well, you must have done something wrong you could/should have avoided, so they don’t need to feel too bad about you. That can also go in the other direction to become power worship: people doing bad stuff can’t actually be bad if they’re not “getting what they deserve”.

It shows up in small ways, too, and all over the political spectrum.

If someone is talking about their disability, and your first reaction is, “well have you tried [x]?” — what you’re really saying is you assume they deserve to be suffering because they must not have tried everything yet. If they tried a little harder, this one thing that you think works for your aunt or a friend, then they would be OK. Because “no, this is just the way it is,” is too terrifying.

In reality, sometimes bad stuff just happens. Not because someone voted the wrong way or was uneducated or they were rude in the past but because bad stuff happens to everybody. There is no grand moral lesson to learn; it’s just Tower of Siloam shit.

However, more of bad stuff happens to you when you’re poor and marginalized; more bad stuff happens when you’re downhill in a hierarchy meant to help people over you and hurt people like you. Sometimes you even get targeted by people specifically who have much more power than you, and regardless you have fewer resources to protect yourself from full impact. And no one else is looking out for you but you.

This is all a lot scarier and less satisfying than, “bad stuff happens to bad and/or lazy people because they did bad and/or careless things” since the real answer means there’s nothing you can ever do to make yourself completely safe.

And yet, that is the most important lesson to learn and try to plan for, as well as for how you treat others.