Things Happen

There is a sentence that sounds like lint. You find it in your pocket later and wonder how it got there. “Things happen.” It is the verbal equivalent of a shrug, a palms-up abdication disguised as wisdom. Gravity talks like that. So does power, when it wants out of the room before responsibility arrives.

After the campus violence — young people running, sirens folding the air into panic — Trump’s response floated up, light as ash: “things happen.” No subject, no cause, no consequence. A weather report delivered indoors. As if the event were a rainstorm and not a decision tree with roots in rhetoric, access, appetite.

This is not new language. It is very old. Empires have always preferred the passive voice; it keeps the blood off the verbs.

At Bondi, when terror burst into a place designed for leisure — salt, sun, the choreography of ordinary joy — the shrug was there too. Not always spoken, but implied. The killer’s logic rhymed with it. Violence framed as inevitability. Death presented as a natural byproduct, like foam at the edge of a wave. What are you going to do, the shrug asks, argue with gravity?

The danger of things happen is not that it is cruel, though it is. It is that it is efficient. It dissolves the chain between belief and action. It tells us there is no “before,” only an “after,” and the after is for mourning, not for thinking. It anesthetizes the public mind while pretending to soothe it.

But things do not simply happen. They are made. They are fed. They are rehearsed in language long before they are enacted in bodies. The shrug is not neutral; it is a permission slip passed quietly across the table.

Refusing it is not hysteria. It is literacy. It is insisting on verbs with spines, on causes with names, on the radical idea that human choices still exist and therefore, so does accountability.