Books: Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved by Kate Bowler (Part 2)

So let's continue talking about the cancer book. As a reminder, here's what I've talked about in Part 1. 

Everything Happens for a Reason by Kate Bowler

I told you some before stories. I don't want to talk about after stories yet. Instead, I want to talk about the American Dream.

"Fairness is one of the most compelling claims of the American Dream, a vision of success propelled by hard work, determination, and maybe the occasional pair of bootstraps" (Bowler 7-8).

The thing about the American Dream is that we all know that if we work hard, we can and will succeed, right? It's only fair.

But also, we have all heard that life isn't fair, right?

So how do we reconcile these conflicting ideas?

This is the hardest part of having an incurable cancer. I've worked hard. I've been determined. I haven't pulled myself up by my bootstraps because that is impossible, but I have done all those things you are supposed to do: got my education, got a good job, got The Husband, got to travel, got to have adventures, and generally got the American Dream. This life certainly hasn't been easy, but karmically speaking, I have felt like most of it made sense.

And then Diagnosis Day happened.

For the first time, I found myself thinking, saying, screaming, "It's not fair!"

Frankly, I never really actually thought that life was fair, but I never expected it to be so monumentally and fundamentally unfair.

This whole American Dream leads you to believe that if you work hard, you'll succeed. Logically, this means that if you don't succeed, it's because you didn't work hard enough; therefore, you deserve your failures. To follow this logic through, it means that I and every one of you deserve the doo-doo that you get, because if only you had worked harder and been a better person, this wouldn't have happened to you.

But I see too many bad things happening to truly good people. I have trouble really believing that any of us deserve any of this. So what does that say about the American Dream?