Chickens, Karma and a Balanced Universe Walk Into a Bar

I use the term, “when the chickens come home to roost,” all the time. I love it. I really do. This may make me a bad person.

The fuller more complete term was authored officially by Robert Southey who in the 19th Century wrote, “curses are like a young chicken: they always come home to roost.”

Karma is a whole different beast although most people distill it to “getting what you give” or reaping what you sow.

Karma is how the sum of your lifelong works and deeds affect you not in an afterlife, but in your next life.

Instant Karma is an even more bastardized version, to the point it has no point. Basically, it’s simple irony. We’re back to chickens coming home to roost.

But while watching someone get what they deserve, is satisfying, it’s also horrifying.

You witness their transgressions. You cringe as they say something horrible or do something deplorable. And then you wait.

And most of the time, it never comes. At least as far as you know.

But then every once in a sweet while, you get to taste the sweet nectar of an evil, ignorant, abhorrent, weak individual getting exactly what a balanced universe demands.

Of course the whole wrath thing can really twist you up. You shouldn’t find joy in the universe crushing an ignorant soul. So when I do, and believe me I do, I have to reel it in.

The guy who is our President now has given us all kinds of opportunities for a universal balance correction.

Of course, despite how youthful he feels, he is an old guy. Will he even live long enough to see the balance correction? I sure hope he does.

His family might. That universal balance could come down on them quite hard.

The bigger question is if we as human beings will live long enough to see it?

Recently I’ve noticed what seems to be a universal balancing here locally. School vouchers and a few school teachers who voted, who emoted, and who are devoted to all things right wing are on a collision course.

They probably should have seen the writing on the wall when in 2011, the state stripped their teacher’s union of collective bargaining.

And that leads to another idiom: Every chicken who comes home to roost knows they don’t poop where they eat.

This balancing is not sweet because who knows if it’s too late to do something about the damage already done to our schools and in the long run to our children.

Considering our current political climate, the fact we even have public school systems is amazing. Can you imagine AOC declaring we must have K-12 education free for all our students? It wouldn’t pass.

Trump Republicans would declare it heresy and socialism!

And in a sense, isn’t that what they are doing now? The Republicans took our small-town hospitals away and now they are on a path to do the same to our schools.

There is a reason the rural south has always lagged in progress, in intellectualism, in culture. Every time we weaken a system that supports the strengthening of our people, we lose.

And those chickens just keep coming home to roost.