Imagine (or probably remember at time when) you are driving down the road, nice and comfy, with your family and/or friends with you. You have the windows down, and the music playing, and the warm summer air whips all around the cabin and you love it because life is wonderful and beautiful. It’s a great time to be alive! But then you look in the rearview mirror and some jackass dickfuck in a beat up-ass car is coming up behind you really quickly. Like he’s doing at least 30 above the speed limit. And although the road is a two-lane road, he stays in your lane, right behind you, zipping up like he’s NASCAR IRL or some shit and only swerves over and passes you when he’s seconds away from plowing into your bumper. He’s obviously drunk because when he passes you he rolls back into your lane, once again like he’s driving in a NASCAR race, and nearly runs off the road. He’s drifting all over the place and lanes apparently don’t exist to this fucker. You immediately get pissed off, and silently (or not so silently) hope that the guy wraps his piece of shit car around a tree or a telephone pole. But there’s only one problem with that: he probably won’t because Karma Sucks and is never instant.

Karma, as understood in our culture which I’ll call American Karma, is usually explained as “getting what you deserve” and in the case of drunk piece of shit above, would be flipping his car over and hitting a telephone pole. Instantly. Karma, in an Eastern sense, has a more metaphysical meaning and I don’t want to get into that here. That is about people getting what they deserve as dished out by the powers at be in the universe in a cause-and-effect relationship. If you’re a jackass, so says the American flavour of Karma, sooner or later (probably sooner) you’ll end up getting what you deserve. Except it never works that way because the Eastern version seems to be the way shit actually works.

The problem with karma seems to be that it takes a long ass time for people to get what they deserve and what they do get is some mild, watered-down form of “getting what they deserve.” This does your sense of justice absolutely zero favors. We want to see the drunken jackass flip his car or truck over immediately, when in reality karma will serve him a much more subtler dish of revenge. Most likely, him being a drunk, he might be expected to have a shitty liver and eventually succumb to cirrhosis or some other drinking related disease in a few decades. Maybe he’ll have a heart attack because of that beer belly and high blood pressure? Drinking wreaks havoc upon the body in general, so you know the guy is going to get what he deserves someday, but that’s my point: someday isn’t really soon enough to us. What’s more satisfying? Seeing a guy wreck his truck and instantly getting what he deserves or knowing that in about 50 years his health won’t be good and he’ll die slightly earlier than usual? That doesn’t feel like justice, it feels too boring to be justice. But that’s reality.

Obviously wishing bad on people probably isn’t the nicest thing you can do, but some people deserve to have bad things happen to them just because of the negativity they bring to the world. It’s simply asking (or wanting) for consequences to catch up with a person. While I was using a drunk driver as an example of a person not getting their due consequence, there are much worse people out there than the drunk. What about the child molester? Or the terrorist? Or the murderer, kidnapper, and torturer? The amount of shit they bring upon people in the world should be immediately met by the universe, so we think, with a swift and just vengeance. But sometimes these people are only met with jail time, and in a lot of cases they can get off totally free. There is no justice sometimes, and the drunk who drives down the road might go a million miles without flipping his truck, and the child molester might not be caught and be held accountable for their deeds. It’s shitty because karma, while it might take forever to work occasionally doesn’t seem to fit the deed, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all.

So next time you see the drunk fly down the road all over the lanes, you’re going to want to see him roll his truck, but he probably won’t. When someone passes you doing 30 over the speed limit you might think you’ll catch them at the next red light, but nope, it’ll be green and there will be no justice for you, the law-abiding citizen. The drunk will make it home and abuse his family without flipping his truck and the speeder will make it home 10 minutes earlier than you will. He might even get the fresh french fries at McDonalds. Sometimes a person robs a gas station and gets away scott-fucking-free and nothing happens to them. The lazy asshole at work somehow gets promoted, and the corrupt millionaire gets elected as a senator. That’s reality and Karma, while it exists in some mild form while people suffer consequences maybe, someday, it’s not Instant, not gratifying, and that fucking Sucks.