Get Away With It

If someone does something and nobody else knows about it, then most of the time nobody ever knows except the person who did the thing. The person who got away with murder.

You may have heard someone use this exaggeration before. Of course, when most people use this phrase, they aren’t talking about crime. They are usually talking about sports. Like if someone commits a foul, but the referee doesn’t see it, then the player got away with the foul. An egregious foul missed in a critical stage of a game could be considered getting away with murder.

If the team wins the game, some analysts might even say the team stole the game. If you cheat and win, then you can be stripped of your wins. There is a big difference though between cheating and getting away with something.

Cheating would imply someone intentionally breaking the set rules for the game. For example, deflating a ball before a game to give yourself a better handle in rainy conditions. The New England Patriots were actually accused of doing this, known as Deflate-Gate in the sports world.

In sports, getting away with something is just considered good luck. Luck is a considerable aspect of many games. Some people even say it’s better to be lucky than good. Others claim to make their own luck. But if you get away with something and win, then is cheating not justified?

There is a principle some humans believe in called karma. It would allow bad things to happen to bad people because they did something deserving of punishment. In some ways, karma is like the supernatural justice served to people who have “gotten away” with a crime.

Now, here’s the problem. Karma doesn’t exist.

As much as I would like to believe there is some balancing force out there that counters evil will with love and goodness, it’s an oversimplification to expect every negative action to be matched with a positive one.

Now, sometimes we call something karma when it is actually just irony or coincidence.

When Oprah fell on stage while talking about the importance of balance, it wasn’t karma tripping her up. If you don’t like Oprah, then maybe you thought it was fitting she would take a tumble with such perfect timing, but we can’t call this karma.

When a showboating or obnoxious athlete makes a bad play and costs his team the game, we can’t call this karma. Why?

The problem is there are always people on the other side. There are people rooting for the team you want to lose. There are people who love Oprah. So, when we use the word karma, it is more about how we feel about the subject when something happens to them.

Furthermore, there are multitudes of shameful actions completely obfuscated out of the public eye. Actual evidence is shocking when we see it.

Last week I saw a video of a police officer purposely dropping crack rocks onto the ground while another officer nearby held down a man. The first officer then slowly picked up the drugs off the ground and began to place them in a bag before noticing he was on camera.

This sort of thing happens more than we would expect. We just don’t see it often enough. People are getting away with it.

There is no karmic wind blowing through the trees of society.

There is justice in law and many times criminals are successfully caught and punished, but many times they are not. The smartest criminals know how to get away with it.

It used to be about the grind, about hustling, making your own luck.

Now, as Killer Mike and El-P say, it’s lie, cheat, steal, and win:

“I’ll tea bag a piranha tank, heart barely beatin’
A wild one who’ll swim like directly after he’s eaten
While holding a toaster oven that’s plugged with a fork in it
Cause death by electrocution’s like life in New York, isn’t it?”

But the game continues on even if the rules change. As we uncover the grimy supports lifting these so-called winners who make their own luck by breaking all the right rules, people will begin to lose interest in the game as they realize winning really isn’t everything if you’re playing for the wrong reasons.

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