Am I a bad person if I take pleasure in another’s misfortune? What if the other person is O.J. Simpson? I had to laugh at this article over at SI about Simpson’s latest legal difficulties.
Without getting into the whole “is he guilty?” issue, I think it is funny to see a man who had everything anyone could ever want falling so low based on his own warped view of reality. He was a star athlete, Heisman winner, first NFL player to rush for 2,000 yards in a season, Pro Football Hall of Famer and rich (or what passed for rich at the time). Basically he had everything any typical sports-loving guy could want but apparently it wasn’t enough. If (allegedly) killing his wife wasn’t enough, now he’s caught up in some lame scandal revolving around some memorabilia resulting in some pretty serious charges (kidnapping, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, and coercion and conspiracy). Not something you want to spend your time worrying about, believe me. Funniest thing of all, though, was reading that his bail bondsman is “You Ring, We Spring!” in FL. Hilarious! 
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Well, OJ didn’t have everything a guy could want. His beautiful wife had separated from him, the custody order on their kids galled him daily, his post-sports entertainment career had hit the wall and he could feel himself slipping down the pecking order of his social network. So he snapped, like a lot of middle-aged guys do: It’s Me Or Them, he thought. And in a moment of darkness he cut human throats past the bone.
He beat the criminal rap, but the Goldman wrongful-death civil suit would almost certainly go against him. So OJ started hiding assets, making gifts of them to loyal friends. Plaques, trophies, safes full of sports memorabilia were noticed to be disappearing from his house.
Years later OJ began attempting to reclaim those “gifts”, only to discover they had changed hands and were now merchandise up for sale like the rest of his estate. If he wanted his memories back he would need money, but the book deal went badly and so did attempts to peddle himself as a cable TV pundit, talk-radio host and offshore action-film star. It must have especially galled that OJ memorabilia isn’t even expensive. So he began knocking on doors again demanding his stuff back. His approach went from tactful to sullen to felony kidnap in several easy stages.
And now here he is, doing county time at retirement age, entering prison at approximately the date he would have been eligible for parole if he had accepted a manslaughter plea on his first case.
We should take away from this that the struggle to achieve balance in our lives is not a war, a bluff or a gamble; it is a tradeoff in which we are always free to give away everything for a big sack of nothing.
This is a timely lesson given what we must soon pass through, a time of national darkness where the temptation to tear out one another’s throats will beckon and every tradeoff risks a misstep into the void.