Random thought: why does everything that goes wrong have to be someone's fault?

It would be nice if everything happened for a reason. It would be nice if we really could believe in the moral certainties we had when we were children (and that some adults - particularly the hardline religious; God does NOT hate New Orleans, you bunch of morons, what are you, eight years old? - don't quite seem to have let go of): that the good are rewarded and the wicked are punished, and that bad things only happen to those who deserve them. It would be nice if that were the case but it isn't. Good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to people who don't deserve it and that's just the way it is, because hey, this is life and that's the way it is. There isn't always a reason for everything that happens.

Because - hey, what do you know? - sometimes shit just happens for no reason other than it has to happen sometime, to someone, somewhere. Sometimes, for reasons beyond everybody's control, things go wrong and there ISN'T always a finger to point. There's no guilty party just waiting to be discovered. These things, people, are called accidents.

I think a lot of people have forgotten about this.

It seems, more and more frequently, that modern society has stopped accepting that things get fucked up, sometimes, for no reason other than that's just the way it goes. We don't have accidents any more. People don't make mistakes in post-millennial Britain. No. These days we're negligent.

We must be punished.

Take school trips. Every so often we hear about accidents, some of them fatal, on school trips. Fingers are pointed. Parents protest. The solution: blame the teachers! Blame the firms! We must ban all school trips! This never used to happen in my day, say the commentators, shaking their gray and grizzled heads, and they bemoan the lack of standards and today's modern schools, the uncontrollability of modern youngsters and the ineffectual modern teacher, unable to keep order. What a symbol of moral decline! Our children aren't even safe on school trips!

But of course it didn't happen. Because back in the '50s or '60s or '70s the average school trip was to a museum. You got on a coach where you were given a bruised apple and a cup of orange water, and were herded off the bus at a predetermined point and trooped in a crocodile around a lot of dusty halls to see a lot of dinosaur bones or artefacts of the industrial revolution. And then you got back on the bus and were driven back to school. And that was it.

Yes, there are accidents on school trips. But what were the children in question doing? Oh, the paper says, they were pot-holing.

I think there you have the answer to why the accident happened. Because pot-holing is not something you do lightly. Even experienced pot-holers get into trouble sometimes. And of course they do. They're underground exploring tunnels and crevasses, some of them full of water. These tunnels can flood. Rapidly. These tunnels can cave in. Unexpectedly.

Isn't the obvious answer to the question of injuries and deaths not to assume that all school trips are now fraught with potential dangers, but to assume that kids are now doing far more dangerous things on them? If someone was killed at the Natural History Museum - say, if the head fell off the Triceratops skeleton and crushed half of Class Four - that would be shocking. But it isn't particularly shocking to hear about a group of inexperienced potholers running into trouble underground. No, not even if said inexperienced potholers are thirteen years old and on a school trip. It's sad, yes, but it's not necessarily anybody's fault if a cavern floods suddenly.

It's not just that. It's everything. Every time we hear of a major accident, sure as noon follows night there'll be a finger pointed, a court case, compensation claims. A desperate attempt to prove that yes, THIS WAS SOMEONE'S FAULT, and that someone is now to be made to pay for it. Maybe these people know somerthing I don't, but sometimes I can't quite see what made a major tragedy into the sole responsibility of say, Mr. Robert Grollins, 43, from Little Piddling on the Water, Northants. He slipped up. He made the mistake. Bob Grollins is the guilty party! It's his fault the 125 to Birmingham derailed!

Look, world: Life. Is. Dangerous. Okay?

The silliest example? The Daily Mail (rabid, right-wing rabbit-hutch liner of a newspaper to any of you from outside this sceptered isle) once had a headline - yes, this was front-page news, people - running 'woman killed by bee sting' or some such. What. The. Fuck. Closer invesitagtion revealed that a British holidaymaker on the Costa del Llama or somesuch similar popular getaway destination amongst Daily Mail readers had been stung by a particularly lethal bee, developed anaphylaxis and died. Sad, but where's the story? Why is this front-page news? What was the Daily Mail proposing? Tougher legislation against holiday bee-stings? That's called an 'accident'. These things happen.

But no. We can't accept that any more. We want someone to blame. We're hurting: how better to make it better than by making someone else hurt back? There's something vaguely Mediaeval about this desire for retribution: why the Hell does society encourage it?