“…Perdition catch my soul // But I do love thee! // And when I love thee not, // Chaos is come again.” (Othello 3.3.90-92)
Is life fair? Lately, some view life’s unfairness, then decide that the world–including, especially, politics–is nothing but chaos.
J.B. [the poetic drama] by Archibald MacLeish, relates, for the modern audience, the familiar story of the Biblical Job. Both have the main character asking the recognizable likeness of “Why me?” or “What did we do to deserve this?” or “Why does it always happen to us?” The answer?
“MacLeish’s Job answers the problem of human suffering, not with theology or psychology, but by choosing to go on living and creating new life.” Job looks for love. “Instead of giving up on the unfair world and life, instead of looking outward, to churches or to nature, for answers . . . look . . . for loving.”
“Why bad things happen to good people [now becomes] no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened.” — Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, 1981.
*Chaos is the confusion that exists before order is established in the universe. (See Chaos theory; John Milton and Chaos.)