Instant Karma

This post is mostly a rant about someone I've hated since freshman year when they did something unbearably dishonest. I'm sorry for the bitchy/ranty tone, but you have to understand that I just can't stand when wrongdoing is not punished.



Unfortunately karma is not always so instant. As much as I've prayed for it at times, rarely have I witnessed assholes get immediately "punished" in some way by cosmic justice. No, when someone cuts me in line on Burrito Night in the cafeteria, instead of being punished by tripping over their own shoes and dropping their food everywhere, they are rewarded with the last bit of guacamole. In the short-term, things are admittedly not very optimistic. But if you're patient...the reward is great.

Rewind a couple of years to a story I've probably told on this blog. Freshman year. A stupid neighbor (not yet legal drinking age) goes out drinking on the coldest night of the year--well below zero--and doesn't come home. The police are called and search parties are sent out because we are afraid that he may have passed out outside, meaning he could very easily freeze to death. Finally after a length search, me and two other girls find him passed out in a building, vomit everywhere. The police had to come and the guy was fined. The guy later challenged the fines, went to court, and brought along 2/3 of the people who found him to testify on his behalf. I was not asked. The other two girls ended up lying in court, under oath, saying that this boy wasn't really drinking, or didn't have a bottle on him (he did...I saw it), and whatnot. And the boy got at least one charge dropped thanks to their false testimony.

What angered me in this situation is that one of the girls talked constantly of how she wanted to be a lawyer. I was never very close with this girl, but the immense hypocrisy of the situation now made being around her unbearable.

Now back to today. I open a campus publication and see an article by this girl. Curious to see what she's been up to, I start reading. Basically it's 500 words on why she feels cheated since she only got into one of a bazillion law schools she applied to. She argued that because of her GPA (decent), her law-related extracurriculars (lame), and her compelling life story (not very compelling), she deserved to have a lot of options for law school. According to her, the law school admissions process doesn't allow the law school to actually get to know the candidate.

So first of all I was extremely embarrassed that she chose to publish the sort of whiny rant that's only appropriate for your mother to hear. Like, really, she came across as so pathetic that I have to imagine that the editors who allowed it to be published in the magazine were high and also dead. But then I was happy. Not because I'm celebrating someone else's failure--okay maybe I am. But what's important to me here is that this girl did something WRONG that went unpunished for three years, and now finally I think it's come back to bite her in the ass. Sure, the law schools don't know she lied under oath, but somehow I think the universe knew.

I just can't believe that someone who showed such complete and utter contempt for this country's legal system thinks she has the right to bitch about the fact that she now will likely not be working in that same legal system that she figuratively shat on. A lawyer should be someone who defends truth and justice, not someone who will blatantly and proudly lie in a courtroom to save a friend a few hundred dollars that he earned--yes, earned--through being a stupid, immature brat with no self-control.

That's not to say that I don't think there's ever a circumstance in which someone should deviate from the truth; this situation just wasn't one of them. I'm not saying that if the Nazis show up you should say, "Yeah, I've got Anne Frank in the attic." Or, by all means, if it's 1856 and you live in South Carolina and some guy asks you if you're hiding his runaway slave in your barn, go for it. Lie your ass off. I fully encourage lying, but only if it's for a moral victory. Lying to the justice system shouldn't be used to protect stupid frat boys from fines that are insignificant to their rich families.

No, my dear, you do not deserve to go to law school since you took a massive dump on the very system you claim to want to uphold. This is karma. And frankly if the law school admission's office actually did get to know the real you, as you seem to want them to do, you wouldn't have been lucky enough to be accepted to even one school.

Karma's a bitch. Like me.
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