Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Everything does not happen for a reason: Some things are completely random and senseless


A popular saying which really annoys me is, "Everything happens for a reason." People believe it (I guess) because they believe in a god who is omnipotent, controlling everything that happens to them. When their innocent four-year-old child dies in a car accident, for example, they will assuage themselves with the notion that it was god's will: "Everything happens for a reason." But that is just stupid.

Yes, the person in the next lane over had an allergic reaction and began sneezing and drove his car into oncoming traffic and caused the car accident which stole the child's life. The accident can be explained. But is that a reason? Is that god's will?

Believers assuage themselves further with the hope that there is a magical afterlife. But I doubt most people, regardless of their vows of faith, believe in that. If they did, why would they want to live? Why would they be sad if their child died? Is he not going to a better place? A person who believes in this heaven must look forward to dying. It's "a better place."

The New York Times reported a story recently about Andrzej Leonik (pictured above), a Polish immigrant who now has a lame leg, no job and no money because of a truly senseless act, one that even the religious would have trouble believing is god's will:
Mr. Leonik, 49, came home from his job as a carpenter in August 2006 and put on a red tank top and took his dog, Sonia, for a walk on 56th Drive in Maspeth, Queens.

A green Cadillac crept toward him and then stopped. Its driver was aiming a 9-millimeter pistol at him. Mr. Leonik slipped behind a utility pole, but the shooter hit his right leg, shattering the femur.

“I heard the shot but couldn’t believe I was hit until I saw the bone sticking out,” he recalled recently. “I thought, ‘Why would someone do this to me?’ ”

He would find out later, while recovering at Elmhurst Hospital Center. The man in the green Cadillac, the police told him, was Matthew Colletta, an unemployed bricklayer with a long history of mental illness and erratic behavior.

The "reason" Mr. Leonik was shot had nothing to do with god's will. It rather had everything to do with the fact that we in the United States don't care about helping and treating people with severe mental illness. The shooter, Mr. Colletta, never should have been allowed to be in charge of his own life. He was dangerous and should have been in a mental hospital, under the care of psychiatrists. If his symptoms responded to medication, he could have then been let out under supervised care. But never should someone who is that ill be left completely alone.
The police said Mr. Leonik was the first of about a dozen people whom Mr. Colletta, then 34, fired upon that evening. He spent the next six hours roaming Queens, randomly shooting people wearing red or riding in red cars, prosecutors said. The spree left one person dead and five wounded.

Prosecutors said Mr. Colletta believed he was being threatened by the Bloods gang, which is identified with the color red. None of the shooting victims were Bloods, certainly not Mr. Leonik. This was a man who stood with the Solidarity trade union while living in Poland in the 1980s and immigrated to New York with his wife and two teenage daughters in 2002, hoping to prosper.

It's scary that Mr. Leonik could survive a totalitarian government in Poland, but he is victimized by our insane system of not forcing the severely mentally ill into treatment.
Instead, he is turning 50 with a bad leg, no job and no money, his American dream dashed.

Hs daughters are helping to support him, now that he can no longer work as a carpenter renovating Manhattan apartments. His wife developed a heart problem and moved back to Poland for health care.

That we also don't have a sensible system of universal coverage, so his wife had to leave him, makes our laws doubly stupid.
Mr. Leonik’s leg has 15 long screws stabilizing it, and scars from knee to hip. He cannot climb stairs or lift heavy objects and at times, his leg is swollen and useless. A coming operation, his fourth, may help, he is told. He grits through the pain, refusing, he said, to waste money on painkillers.

More torturous is the notion that his fortunes nose-dived because of the color shirt he put on one quiet summer evening to walk the dog, he said.

Think how many people's lives are destroyed by the insanity of our civil libertarian policies when it comes to dealing with the severely mentally ill?
“For a long time, I could not sleep because of the pain,” he said. “I’d think, ‘Why me? Why did this happen? How am I going to make it? I’ve become a burden to my family.’ ”

His small savings ran out quickly. Since he lacked proper immigration documentation, he had trouble receiving benefits.

“I was making good money and the whole world was open,” he said, with the help of an interpreter. “I was going to send my daughters to college and buy a house, but things turned out otherwise.”

That perfectly speaks to the notion that "everything happens for a reason." Does anyone believe it was god's will that Mr. Leonik and his family should be destroyed by this crazy act of a madman who did not have control of his faculties? A man who was only driving around like that because we refuse to lock up the severely mentally ill?
Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, lent Mr. Leonik a hand by providing $919 to help with his phone and electric bills. And they provided an immigration counselor, Malgorzata Ulbrych-Luczynski, who has helped him apply for a visa that is available to certain crime victims.

Preventing incidents like this would be a far wiser use of our public dollars. If we had forced the shooter into treatment for his illness, one man would be alive and the lives of dozens of others would be normal. Mr. Leonik would not need charity.
Mr. Leonik recalled that when he fell from the gunshot, Sonia leapt onto his chest. The shooter sped off, but his face was seared into Mr. Leonik’s memory, and he later testified before a grand jury and identified Mr. Colletta from an array of photographs, helping prosecutors indict him on second-degree murder and other charges.

What kind of system is it where we even prosecute the mentally ill? The person deserving prosecution is the one who emptied out the mental hospitals which used to treat people like Colletta.
Mr. Colletta has pleaded not guilty, and his trial is likely to start early next year. There were long delays because he changed lawyers repeatedly, prosecutors said recently.

If Colletta ever gets out of prison, he will again likely become a danger to everyone, once he stops taking anti-psychotic medications. Hopefully our laws change between now and then. Mr. Colletta does not belong in a jail cell. He belongs in a mental hospital.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

I like your writing and agree with your perspective on this issue. I was surprised at the grief you got in the Enterprise over your article; I felt the writers hadn't read the same article. On the other hand, I think it is unfortunate that you mingle your sensible views on mental health with your, excuse me, nonsensical views on theology. The issues are not related. I am not a particularly religious person, but if I were, I'm sure bias against religion would turn me off to what should have been your thesis: Mentally people need to be helped, and the rest of society needs to be protected from those whose mental illness makes them violent.

Rich Rifkin said...

"I think it is unfortunate that you mingle your sensible views on mental health with your, excuse me, nonsensical views on theology. The issues are not related."

I agree that the issues are not directly related. The tie here is just how random events can alter the course of anyone's life beyond all reason. So when someone tells me, "everything happens for a reason," I believe they are full of nonsense.

I have no doubt that you are right that my beliefs about fundamentalist religion are annoying to many religious people. That's okay with me. If someone professes his belief in quackery of any kind, I find that annoying; and I'm perfectly content to let the "believer" know that. I don't understand why he should have the right to annoy others with his thoughts, but no one else should be able to tell him he's full of it.

Rich Rifkin said...

By the way ... If you read the history of the closure of mental hospitals in California, going back to the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1969, you would find that the motivation for Mr. Lanterman and many of his colleagues on the right* was religion and strangely enough, anti-communism.

The John Birch Society (which Lanterman was tied in with) preached that psychiatry was a communist-Jewish plot and that the public mental hospitals did no good, but were enriching communist-liberal-Jewish doctors. (This sounds like a joke, but it's true.)

Most Christians in California in the late 1960s were not Birchers, of course. But all Birchers were Christian fundamentalists and they employed a lot of prejudice and no science to form their opinions on many scientific questions.

The unholy alliance that formed to shutter mental hospitals needed the left, too. That was where Nicolas Petris, the far-left lawmaker from Oakland came in. The left was pushed by a civil libertarian concerns; and by exposes of some bad treatment in some hospitals. They were convinced that the mentally ill would get better treatment on their own devices, if we allowed the patients to decide if they wanted treatment or not.

Left-wing writers like Ken Kesey and hordes of ACLU lawyers fought for years to "free" mental patients. They never had any change of heart when most of these "freed" patients ended up homeless and very often the victims of crimes (esp. women getting raped).

The worst provision of Lanterman-Petris-Short was that is essentially forbade involuntary lock-ups, unless the person was being held for having committed a serious crime.

*Most people remember Gov. Reagan as the prime motivator of closing our mental hospitals. It's true that he tried to. However, he actually failed in his effort. Most of the later closures were the result of L-P-S. But Reagan was tied in with the same anti-communist and religious fanatics on the right as Frank Lanterman was.

Rich Rifkin said...

One more thing ... the greatest irony of all is that Reagan was eventually shot and nearly killed by John Hinckley, a mental patient who needed to be hospitalized, but could not be because he "chose" to be free.

Ida said...

Andrzej is homeless and needs surgery.

here is the lasted nytimes article.
please send a check to P.O. Box 863697
Ridgewood, N.Y. 11386

or donate through http://fundly.com/adfadf

He needs a room to be in in order to
have another surgery, so he can walk
and work.

Ida said...

Andrzej is homeless and needs surgery.

here is the lasted nytimes article.
please send a check to P.O. Box 863697
Ridgewood, N.Y. 11386

or donate through http://fundly.com/adfadf

He needs a room to be in in order to
have another surgery, so he can walk
and work.

Ida said...

please donate to Andrzej Leonik, who
is homeless and in desperate need of surgery.
you can donate to http://fundly.com/adfadf,
or send a check to him at
P.O. Box 863697
Ridgewood, N.Y. 11386

here is the nytimes article.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/living-in-his-van-trying-to-rebuild-a-life-upended-by-a-bullet/

Ida Gatwood