There are people who believe there are no accidents and it’s all due to negativity & karma
A few weeks ago I listened to the entire book on tape of “The Secret,” that Oprah-lauded book that tells us that life is a cosmic catalog and all we have to do is put in our order. It sounded like all of the other self help books I’ve read but with one difference: it took the “you are the master of your own destiny” stuff way too far. There were parts of it that really helped me, and there were parts that I found incredibly offensive. Author Rhoda Byrne says that there are no accidents and even mass tragedies occur because the victims are all resonating on a negative level. She says this in the book on tape like she’s imparting this great, sad wisdom but I found it incredibly cruel and haughty. She also claims that in order to get thin, you have to avoid even looking at overweight people. I wish I was making this up. (I was talking with JayBird about the book and she pointed me to this critical article on Salon that mirrored a lot of my thoughts.)

Sharon Stone called last year’s Chinese earthquake “karma”
When I heard Byrne’s claim that mass tragedies happen because the victims somehow deserve it (she didn’t say this exactly but it’s not a huge logical leap) I immediately thought of the terrible earthquakes in China last year that claimed nearly 70,000 lives. Sharon Stone evoked hatred around the world by suggesting that the earthquakes were somehow “karma” for the Chinese government’s treatment of Tibet. Stone said at the time “I’m, you know, not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans… And then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?”

Except Sharon was referring to little kids, moms, dads, sons, aunts, and people who had nothing to do with their government’s oppression. That’s like dismissing it casually if an entire city in the US was wiped out and saying it was karma for whatever our country has done.

I believe that there are accidents in life, and that of course people get sick, die and have problems without causing them indirectly or directly. It’s not all random, but it’s not all our fault, either. We have control of how we deal with life and what outlook we take. We can prevent some things, but not everything. It can make people feel better to rationalize that someone who died or got sick brought it on themselves, because that would mean they’re not susceptible to the same kind of fate. There’s a haughty kind of dismissal to that, and many of those same people who think other people have problems because they’re defective are quick to point to outside factors when faced with their own crisis.

Ashton Kutchter twittered that David Carradine’s death was “crazy karma”
So that lengthy introduction is all about the fact that Ashton Kutcher brought up the “K” word when referring to David Carradine’s death. He twittered that it was “crazy karma”:

What an awful and confusing way to go. There is some crazy karma in that.
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

Remind me to never asphyxiate myself while masterbating [sic] in bangkok. It just confused [sic] people.
about 4 hours ago from Tweetie

[From Ashton Kutcher’s twitter via Radar Online]

To be fair to Ashton, he quickly realized he said something super stupid, and tweeted that he wouldn’t delete the evidence and would have to face the consequences “sometimes you have to take licks 4 doing stupid stuff. Deleteing wouldn’t make it go away it would just hide it.”

I have mixed feelings about this. This is different than an accident because it was one guy who is presumed to have been engaging in a very risky practice that resulted in his death. If that is the case, and we do not know for sure if it is, it’s not really karma and more like statistical probability. You have someone who does something repeatedly that has a much higher risk of death than a typical habit and then they die. How is that karma and not just luck of the draw though? If you play Russian roulette and die it’s because you were playing Russian roulette, not because you were necessarily a bad person.

A director who worked with Carradine on one of his last films said that he told him that “in moments of intense sexual activities one could get a glimpse of God and the aftermath.” This suggests that he may have been involved in auto-erotic asphyxiation at the time. His ex-wife also cited his “deviant sexual behavior which was potentially deadly” during their divorce proceedings in 2003.

Was someone else in the room when Carradine died?
On the other hand, Carradine had his hands tied when he died. Many have pointed out that he may have done it to himself, and it’s supposedly common among people who are into auto-erotic asphyxiation to tie themselves up to heighten the thrill. He was also in Thailand, which is known for its prostitution, and there’s speculation that someone left the scene after he died when the stunt went too far. His family wants to get the FBI involved in the investigation, and Carradine’s lawyer has suggested that he may have been murdered by a secret martial arts society after delving too deeply into their affairs. I’m leaning toward the accidental death theory, but you can’t blame his family for wanting a thorough investigation.