A while ago, I was listening to a weekly radio show on PBS called "This American Life". Each episode has a particular theme and people tell stories related to that theme. I was really taken by a story about a man who had experienced extreme injustice but was unable to correct it.
He told how he was innocently driving his car in a residential neighborhood when he was violent smashed into and practically killed by a hit and run driver. The guilty driver, who was drunk, sped away from the scene but was stopped when he hit a tree a couple of blocks away.
The narrator of the story recounted how he was soon surrounded by police and emergency vehicles, and how one of the cops wrote up the accident report and asked him to sign off on it. He was so shaken up and dazed, he didn't read it before he signed.
A couple of weeks later, he received a notice in the mail demanding that he pay $10,000 or so for repair of the drunk driver's BMW. It turned out that the cop who wrote the accident report had mixed up the description of the cars and indicated that the innocent driver was at fault.
The man assumed, of course, that it was a simple mistake but when he contested it, the police refused to believe him. Incredulous, he started fighting this extreme injustice in court after court, but at every turn, he was thwarted and told that the claim was legit and he had to pay.
He became obsessed with his effort to get justice. It was all he thought about, all he did, until about a year later, his girlfriend confronted him and told him how the past year was a total hell for her and she couldn't take it anymore. He was no longer any fun, all his friends were avoiding him, there was no topic of conversation other than his lawsuit.
And you know what he did? He paid.
He realized that he couldn't win and he paid so he could put that miserable chapter in his life behind him. It was wrong, it was unfair, but life provided him with no other option for him to move on other than to pay.
My post on these pages last week about the pain of having to accept the affair partner in one's children's lives, triggered a lot of responses from women who were angry at the injustice of a husband who moved on, showing them no concern, no remorse, no sensitivity or caring at the end of the marriage. Several women felt it their duty to tell the kids what a callous bastard he is and how his behavior was wrong.
Some women and men who have been left make it their life's mission to try to reap justice in a situation where there is no justice. The longer they try, the more desperate they feel because the ex-spouse and the world at large loses interest. You can't get blood from a stone.
So, like the innocent driver in the story above, there comes a time when you have to cut your losses and move on, not for the sake of the one who hurt you, but for your own sake, because life is too beautiful to spend it mad.
