A student cries

     This isn't fair

A teacher replies

     Well life isn't fair

I sit and look on

Troubled by what is going on

     ...life isn't fair?

Is that your idea of justification?

To every situation 

I want to reply but have no words to explain what I feel inside

I know that isn't right

But I can't reply to her 

At least not now when I have no words

No sense of why I know this, feel this to be utter nonsense 

Of course, why would the teacher care about the feelings of a student s/he hasn’t learned to put into words

 

But now I can respond

Many years later I imagine myself rising proudly and defiantly from my desk: 

You justify something unfair by more unfairness in the world? Justified or not!?

You don't stop and look to question?

 

It is people like you whom hinder change

It is people like you that carry on the past without question

It is people like you that refuse to challenge the status quo

It is people like you whom take something at face value and refuse to ever improve it

It is people like you who discourage progress

It is instructors like you whom stop children from questioning

It is people like you whom continue life as it was in the beginning making no effort to be better

It is your lack of concern that obscures ingenuity

It's your kind that keeps us behind

Never looking forward

Only backward

At a past that keeps moving 

Farther and farther away 

 

And yet you never realize that by looking at the distancing dock behind,

the course you continue to take

Will lead you to the rocky shallows of the island you are approaching

If only you had turned around 

To see the land in front of you

You would be able to steer your ship to the safest side of the land

And save your passengers

Rather than continue listening to the retired captain shouting towards you directions

He whom remains back at the dock,

unknowing of an island ahead

All the retired captain can do is try and scream his orders to you, which will fade away the further you steer away into your "unforeseen" doom

Repeating to yourself and others 

     Life isn't fair

Promotes the use of excuses for things that could have possibly been prevented 

It stuns a person’s sense of wonder and questioning