Bad Stuff Happens, I

 When I was in college, some of the other students liked making short films.  Although it was strictly a liberal arts school, a few of them had an interest in going into media and movies; it was good practice for them, and a lot of fun.  The films generally made it into the entertainment that opened our four or five annual dances.  They were almost always nerdy, full of inside jokes, frequently parodic of more serious fare (The Godfather, samurai cinema, murder mysteries, etc.).

One of the ones that has stuck with me was a film--I forget the title--with the oft-repeated tagline "bad stuff happens."  I could not tell you the plot, although a burglary was involved, along with serious bodily harm to (I think) the burglar.  At which the narrator solemnly intoned, as if we were in a Victorian morality play, "Bad stuff happens."  I believe his last iteration of the words was followed by the sententious statement, "It's for the children."

In the never-ending news cycle of 2020, with civil wars and dying supreme court justices and pandemics and fires and, well, bad stuff happening, I can't help but think of that movie and laugh.

Bad stuff happens all the time.  It always has.  History is not merely one darn thing after another, it's mostly one bad darn thing after another.  (Come to think of it, maybe that's what the "darn" was there for in the first place.)  And so we make funny films about people who take it too seriously.  I don't think this is apathy.  I think it's realism.  There's absolutely nothing I can do about the Bad Stuff that Happens.  It is not unique.  And that suggests that it's not as important as the never-ending news cycle tends to make us think.