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.