bad luck

Some illnesses can be caused by your own fault.  But there are some that you get out of sheer bad luck.  Epilepsy can be one of them.

A couple of years ago, there were two car accidents, one after another, caused by young men with epilepsy, and epileptics became a sudden danger to the society.  One of the accidents was caused by a professional crane driver in his early twenties who happened to have a seizure during work.  He killed a couple of children heading for school early in the morning.  Today, the court demanded the former driver and his mother (who had paid for her son's driving school and whatnot knowing that he had epilepsy and was thus at risk of causing accidents) to pay 120 million yen to the victims and their family.

I definitely feel sorry for the victims.  The driver should've chosen a different job.  He must've had other options.  Many other.

But what if he hadn't?  It's not like the country has special support for people with epilepsy.  Epileptics also need a job.  And it's not even their fault that they have epilepsy.  It was just bad luck.

So I think the judgement was pretty bitter for the driver and his mother.  I wouldn't say the children were killed as an inevitable social sacrifice to support this young man with epilepsy, but I sometimes think it's unfair that patients who have no reason to be blamed for their illness have to bear their expenses.  Of course it's not only epileptics that suffer bad luck. Everyone learns to cope and live with their own problems.

Still, I kind of dream of a society that distributes personal burdens that come from bad luck.  There are already some systems that enables that, but the two car accidents maybe showed that it's not enough.  Punishing epileptic drivers might not take us anywhere until we learn to support each other.