Yeah Well, Life's Not Fair

Remember when you were a kid and Jessica Fairbanks, your best twin-name friend/nemesis, got to ride the pretty tall white horse named Dakota, and you got stuck with the fat old flea-bitten fart of equine genetics named Ralph. And how you expressed to your mother that,"It's not fair!"? and she responded with something to the tune of, "Yeah Well, life's not fair (YWLNF)." And how in that moment YWLNF was least desirable pentad of words you would ever ever want to hear?

Then when you got older and found out that indeed life IS NOT fair and that its' injustices both small and large are not only ever-present but yet to come. And that if you said "It's not fair," every time something was not fair you would be a miserable/infantalized adult with no friends and an equally disgruntled parrot named Lady?

Yes, life is full of inequalities- My students make sure to remind me of this on a daily basis. I try as little as possible to drop the YWLNF line of them, but sometimes it's all I got. I started thinking- What can really truly justify the YWLNF line. Less- "My boss is a prick loser and has out for me" and more "Life's a bitch and then you die"- I came up with a list.

1.) Having extremely abusive/shitty parents
2.) Innocent Bystander Casualties
3.) Extreme Psoriasis
4.) Colostomy Bag Necessity
5.) Severe Wheat/Gluten Allergies- seriously, what.
6.) Genocide
8.) Dirty drinking water
9.) Underdeveloped/absent sexual organs
10.) The fact that nearly 99.9% of the population will never get to go to outer space.

Sometimes you'll hit a kid with YWLNF because they're upset that they got the blue frisbee instead of the green one. Then other times you have to explain to a 7 year old that the reason they are not coming back to the same class next year is because their crackhead mother, with her own abusive background, exposed them to so much severe emotional, chemical, and sexual trauma at the age of 3 that their current guardian can no longer take on the challenges of caring for such a damaged child, and that they have to be shipped to another city where their Child Protective Services case was first opened, and entered into the foster care system, where they will not know anyone, will gain an even deeper sense of abandonment than they already have and have to rely on the failings of the under-funded Social Services to survive past high school.

But you can't really say YWLNF to a kid like that because they already know- and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it- I guess that's what makes certain parts of Life truly unfair- - the inability to change them