Since the time before humans, God has been arranging paybacks. The examples below include paybacks overturning size, wealth, and political power as well as repaying nastiness with nastiness and greed with loss. The examples are in chronological order. They show that the time between an action and its payback can be 1,000,000s of years, 1000s of years, 30 years, 10 years, 7 years, 1 year, several months, 3 months, or instant.
I include one example of my own unpleasant karma. Another form of karma is regret, as my poem at the end of this post reveals.
Before Humans
1,000,000s of years
Brontoscorpio anglicus — thunder scorpion in English — was an aquatic scorpion. It was one of the largest animals on Earth during the Silurian period (443.7 to 416.0 million years ago) and was a dangerous predator with fish as its prey. Over time, Brontoscorpios anglicus moved onto land where it found less oxygen than in the sea. The primitive lungs of Brontoscorpios anglicus could not take in enough oxygen to maintain its body’s huge size. The huge body had to shrink to survive. During the Devonian period (416-359.2 million years ago), this once huge and dangerous arthropod became smaller prey for giant killer fish. Time had changed circumstances, reversing the sizes and roles of Brontoscorpio anglicus and fish. According to the documentary Walking with Monsters: Life Before Dinosaurs, “Paybacks are as ancient as time itself.”
Humans Behaving as Gods on Earth
1000s of years
King Tutankhamen (King Tut) was an Egyptian Pharaoh in the 18th dynasty. He became pharaoh at age 9 and died at age 18.
Unlike other pharaohs, King Tut’s funeral was rushed. His mummy was burnt because his body was not given the 40 days of desiccation (drying) plus 30 days of oil application and wrapping. His embalming incision was “odd” and “brutal”. His arms were placed in an “unusual” position. His mummification was “peculiar”.
The paintings on the wall in his tomb were still wet when the tomb was sealed, allowing brown spots to develop. Unlike other pharaoh tombs, large sections of the walls in King Tut’s tomb were left blank. Tomb painters put very few hieroglyphics on the walls.
The tomb itself was the size of an official’s tomb, not a pharaoh’s tomb. The grave goods were taken from other tombs, including King Tut’s famous burial mask. It was two pieces rather than one piece. The original face had been removed and a new face was welded to the rest of the mask. The ears on the new face had holes for earrings. Adult men in Tut’s time did not wear earrings. The face on the mask more closely matches Nefertiti’s face rather than Tut’s face. Nefertiti was either Tut’s mother or stepmother. DNA experts have interpreted testing results both ways.
Why the rush, shortchanging, and second hand burial goods? King Tut’s Vizier (advisor) Ay wanted the throne for himself. Ay made himself pharaoh even though Tut had chosen Horemheb to succeed him if he died before he had children. Horemheb was commander in chief of the army and in Asia when Tut died. He did become Pharaoh after Ay died.
Ay had himself buried in a far larger tomb than King Tut. Historians believe that Ay used his own tomb for Tut’s burial and Tut’s tomb for his burial.
Ay wasn’t the only Pharaoh to shortchange King Tut. Pharaoh Horemheb dated his own reign back to Amenhotep III, erasing Ay, King Tut, and Akhenaten, Tut‘s father. Seti I and Ramesses II of the 19th dynasty erased King Tut (as well as Akhenaten and Ay) from a king list of “legitimate” pharaohs at the religious center in Abydos. Looking only at the inscriptions, you would not know that Tut was ever pharaoh. Seti I and Ramesses II thought they had denied Tut immortality.
Four pharaohs with all the wealth and power of gods on earth tried to shortchange King Tut or erase him completely from history. God arranged for some payback.
King Tut’s tomb is located in the deepest part of the Valley of the Kings. After Tut’s death, flash flooding washed water into the valley from three different directions. The water collided in the deepest part of the valley, right above Tut’s tomb. The collision of rushing water slowed the flooding and dropped 1 to 2 meters of rock-filled sediment on top of Tut’s tomb. The sun baked “the flood layer as hard as concrete” making the flood sediment look like “the natural floor of the valley”, according to geologist Stephen Cross. Cross considers the sediment “almost the perfect camouflage for the tomb”.
King Tut was buried with spring flowers. Cross believes the flooding took place the following fall. Tut’s tomb was vulnerable to robbers for less than a year before what Egyptologist Chris Naunton calls “a natural act of God” made it disappear for more than 3000 years. Because Seti I and Ramesses II left Tut’s name off of their king list, grave robbers did not know they should look for his tomb.
When Howard Carter discovered his tomb in 1922, King Tut became the “best known figure” in Egyptian history. Tut’s “name lives on more than any other ruler”. According to Egyptologist Dr. Peter J. Brand, University of Memphis, the discovery of King Tut’s tomb was “the most important moment in archaeological history.”
Note that Ay, Horemheb, Seti I, and Ramesses II all thought that wealth and power gave them the right to create a world order that suited their desires. Their world order was not God’s world order, so God arranged a payback.
Political Beliefs Over Human Rights
30 years
In South Africa, Nelson Mandela held several leadership positions in the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC fought to end the apartheid system of segregation and discrimination imposed by the white government. It also fought to end the killings of blacks, including women and children.
In 1964, the apartheid government of South Africa sent Nelson Mandela to prison for life, having convicted him of treason. When Mandela and other ANC members arrived at Robben Island a warder told them, “This is the Island. This is where you will die.” History proves that God had other plans.
In the 1980s, calls to free Nelson Mandela kept getting louder and more widespread. The two most prominent world leaders in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, refused to see Mandela as anything other than a communist. The Prime Minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney, saw Mandela as a man trying to gain freedom for all black South Africans in a country that created harsh segregation. Whenever Reagan and Thatcher and Mulroney discussed Nelson Mandela, Reagan and Thatcher would always state their belief that anti-apartheid leaders were communists. In his autobiography, Memoirs, Mulroney recalled his response:
“How can you or anyone else know that? He’s been in prison
for 20 years and nobody knows that, for the simple reason
no one has talked to him — including you. Besides, if I and
my people were being oppressed by a racist state whose actions
were killing my brethren, I’d take help from anyone if the west
wouldn’t give it to me. And that includes communists.”
In 1986, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. President Reagan vetoed it. Before passage of the act, Reagan had gone on television to warn Americans that the act was “immoral” and “utterly repugnant”. The Senate (78 to 21) and House (313 to 83) overrode Reagan’s veto. Even after the Republican majority congress overrode Reagan’s veto, Reagan did not fully implement the sanctions.
Reagan refused to recognize that God had already begun working through other people to bring an end to South Africa’s apartheid and Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment. Sports associations boycotted South Africa at least as far back as the 1950s. The United Nations passed a nonbinding resolution calling for sanctions against South Africa in 1962. As time passed, artists and musicians boycotted South Africa as well.
God also influenced ordinary people to become payback agents. One example comes from a woman who found she had a connection to South Africa’s pass laws. Regulations to control the movement of South African blacks to the benefit of powerful whites began in the 18th and 19th centuries when the Dutch and British ran a slave economy. In 1952, the South African government passed a law requiring all black African males over the age 16 to carry a passbook with their photographs. Between 1800 when the first regulations were passed until the pass laws were repealed in 1986, whites arrested between 15 and 20 million blacks for violating the laws that denied them human rights.
Through a “fluke”, Polaroid worker Caroline Hunter discovered that her employer provided the camera system the South African government used to produce photographs for passbooks. Hunter launched a boycott of Polaroid with the man who would become her husband, Ken Williams. The campaign grew to include boycotts and divestment campaigns against other corporations. Hunter and Williams testified before Congress in 1971. Around the world, other ordinary people launched and took part in anti-apartheid boycotts.
President FW de Klerk released Mandela from prison in 1990. The South African Parliament repealed apartheid laws in 1990. When Nelson Mandela visited New York that same year, broadcast journalist Ted Koppel asked him the question President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher never bothered to ask.
Ted Koppel: “Well, now, the Communists…”
Mandela: “They were the only ones who helped us. Next question.’”
In 1994, South Africans elected Nelson Mandela to be their first black president. When Nelson Mandela died in 2013, his funeral became a world event as people around the world joined South Africans in mourning the man who chose reconciliation over revenge.
The apartheid government sent Nelson Mandela to prison for the rest of his life in 1964. In 1994, Mandela took office as President of South Africa. He will be remembered for the rest of human history as the man who chose to forgive the people who imprisoned him instead of taking revenge on them.
Once again, humans with temporary power (human power is always temporary) thought they could create a world order to suit their desires. Their world order was not God’s world order, and God arranged a payback. God created widespread and continuing attention plus honor for a man assigned to obscurity by humans with temporary power.
Segregation Over Equality
10 Years
In southern United States during the 1950s, many cities had ordnances requiring black riders to either sit in the back of the bus or give up their seats to white riders. Montgomery, Alabama was one of those cities.
On December 1, 1955, seamstress and servant Rosa Parks got on a bus and sat in the front row of the seats allowed to African Americans. When the bus driver told her to give up her seat for a white person, Parks refused. Montgomery police arrested Rosa. Black leaders organized a bus boycott that lasted for more than a year. The boycott included organized carpools. Black taxi drivers charged the same amount as bus fare, 10 cents. Many African American residents walked everywhere. White women drove their black maids to and from their job work. The city took the matter all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld a lower court ruling striking down segregation. The buses became integrated on December 21, 1956.
Rosa’s coworkers fought with her. She left that job. Her black peers ostracized her. Husband Raymond quit his job after his employer prohibited him from talking about Rosa in the workplace. Neither could find anyone to hire them. People made death threats. They moved Detroit, Michigan, but Rosa lived alone in Hampton, Virginia for a while where she found work.
In Montgomery, Rosa and Raymond Parks lived in an apartment on Cleveland Avenue. In 1965, Montgomery renamed the street Rosa Parks Avenue.
In 1991, the Smithsonian unveiled a bust of Rosa Parks.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded Rosa Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award he could give.
In 1999, Congress awarded Rosa Parks the Congressional Gold Medal, its highest civilian award.
Time Magazine included Rosa Parks in its Time 100 special issue of “Heroes and Icons Of The 20th Century”. It identified Parks as “The Torchbearer”.
After her death in 2005, Rosa Parks lay in honor at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. She was the first woman and the first American who had not been a government official to receive that honor.
In 2018, the Alabama Legislature declared December 1st to be Rosa Parks Day in Alabama.
In 2019, Montgomery unveiled a statue of Rosa Parks in the city’s downtown area on the second annual Rosa Parks Day.
Rigged Criminal Prosecution
7 years
Nicholas L. Bissell Jr was county prosecutor in Somerset County, New Jersey for 13 years, starting in 1982.
In 1991, Bissell rigged a prosecution against Isaac Wright Jr. He ordered police officers to falsify records and make up evidence against Wright. He is also said to have “directed false testimony from witnesses and made deals with defense attorneys to have their clients lie on the stand and point to Isaac Wright Jr as their drug boss.” Bissell’s tactics got Wright convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He would be ineligible for parole for 30 years.
In prison, Wright taught himself New Jersey law. He presented himself at his trial and for a later appeal. He was able to overturn his conviction after he got a Somerset county detective to confess to the prosecutorial misconduct. Detective James Dugan identified Nicholas L. Bissell Jr as the mastermind behind the misconduct. A judge threw out all of Wrights convictions in 1998, making Wright a free man.
Nicholas L. Bissell was charged with dozens of crimes, including abuse of power. In 1996 he was convicted on all 30 counts. He fled from New Jersey to Nevada where he committed suicide in a cheap motel.
While in prison, Wright worked as a prison paralegal. He helped more than 20 other inmates go free and win reduced sentences. He also created new law.
“Some of his legal arguments made new law that lawyers now argue and courts follow.”
Wright went on to formally earn his law degree in 2007. He passed his bar exam in 2008. Wright needed another payback from God to be able to practice law, however. The New Jersey bar’s Committee on Character investigated Wright for nine years. The New Jersey Supreme Court admitted Wright to the bar in 2017.
Isaac Wright Jr is now a defense attorney with Hunt, Hamlin & Ridley in Newark, New Jersey. He is back in the courtroom where he was wrongly convicted. Now he is there as a licensed attorney, where he is living his purpose in going to law school, slaying giants for a price. He doesn’t need a price when a case meets certain conditions.
“And if the giant is big enough and the cause is important enough, I’ll do it for free,
especially when it involves helping those who cannot help themselves.”
The law school Wright attended, Saint Thomas University School of Law, named its cafeteria after Wright.
Further payback for Isaac Wright Jr is a series about his life on the ABC television network, For Life.
Nastiness To A Former Friend
1 year
When I was in my early 20s, I needed to share the rent and asked a friend to move in with me. We were better friends than roommates, and our time as roommates killed our friendship.
Instead of recognizing our differences, instead of acknowledging my own mistakes, instead of taking responsibility for my own actions, I chose to blame my former friend for everything that had gone wrong. To make sure my friend knew I blamed her for everything, I wrote her a nasty letter. I only remember one word from my letter – “nauseous”. I don’t remember anything else I wrote except that I thought up the nastiest things I could say pertaining to her personality and her life. I underlined a number of words and sentences, including the word nauseous. When I mailed that letter full of nastiness, I felt a wonderful self-satisfaction.
Less than a year later, I met a man through a coworker and started dating him. At the time I was coping with one of the worst experiences of my life and this man did what he could to help me. Then he started talking marriage. I started planning a wedding. Suddenly, this man told my coworker that I had misunderstood everything he had said. I knew what the word “married” meant. I told my coworker that he hadn’t heard what this man said to me. But my would-be fiancé refused to admit to anything and blamed me for everything. To make sure I knew he blamed me for everything, my would-be fiancé wrote me a letter. I’m certain he felt a wonderful self-satisfaction when he mailed it.
Can you guess what that letter said?
That letter said everything I had written to my former friend, word for word — including the word “nauseous”. My would-be fiancé had even underlined the same sentences and words I had underlined, including the word nauseous. I don’t have that letter anymore, but I wish I did. I wish I had a copy of the letter I sent to my former friend. Together they would be concrete evidence that God arranges paybacks, so we better think before we speak or act.
Being on both sides of the nastiness made me realize that every nasty statement I made to my former friend was what I felt about myself. God gave me a payback that made me recognize who I was.
Disregard Of Privacy
Several Months
A 70 year old woman was in the locker room of a gym, expecting privacy. Dani Mathers decided the woman did not deserve privacy and took a sneaky photograph of her. She added a body shaming comment and posted it to social media. Someone reported this to the police, who arrested Mathers for misdemeanor invasion of property. The court sentence included community service, three years probation, and an order to not snap photos of other people or post them online without their permission. Payback was perfect.
“It’s taught me a lot about privacy. I’ve lost a lot of that myself as
well. We’ve had a lot of paparazzi involved in my family life. I had
my privacy taken away after I took someone else’s.”
Greed At Tax Time
3 Months
My friend J. had a high paying job at a Chicago television station. He asked me one evening if I had watched the big sports game the previous Sunday. I said no. He laughed and told me he had accidentally made the game “go away” in the middle of a play.
J. had enough money to own a fancy motorcycle, a fancy sports car, and an everyday car for Chicago’s cold weather. During the winter, J. kept his sports car in a garage and his motorcycle in his apartment where he would take it apart piece by piece and warn any visitors not to disturb the carefully laid out trails of parts.
For some reason, J. decided to cheat on his tax return to the tune of $300. Within three months, his $300 camera disappeared. J. told me about his cheating and his camera. He said, “I knew when I cheated on my taxes that something like this would happen.”
J. stole money from other taxpayers and God paid him back by taking away something of equal value.
Failure To Consider Others
Instant Or Almost Instant
“22 People Who Discovered Karma The Hard Way”
Nicole.LB
Diply
No Date
“25 Hilariously Awful Social Media Posts That Got People Fired”
Offbeat
No Date
“A Chinese boy got instant karma after urinating on the buttons of an elevator”
Sujin Thomas
Business Insider Singapore
February 27, 2018
“Vigilante Biker Gets Revenge on Drivers Who Litter”
IB Times UK
September 17, 2014
Your Choice
Present & Future
The powers of size, wealth, and political status are temporary powers, no match for God’s permanent power. The self-satisfaction of nastiness is no match for God’s power. The trickery of greed is no match for God’s power.
My former friend and roommate died before I had the emotional courage to apologize to her. I have apologized to her soul. She is one of the women I was thinking about when I wrote the poem, “I Mourn You”. Regret is a particularly effective form of payback.
Think about the paybacks, apologies, and regrets you would like to avoid, then take the appropriate actions to avoid them in the present and future.
I Mourn You
I mourn you,
the girls and women of my life —
mother
sisters
cousins
aunts
friends
neighbors
colleagues
I mourn what we could have been, done, celebrated if
you had not decided I was
unworthy
of your love, attention, status.
I mourn you,
the girls and women of my life —
grandmother
cousins
friends
neighbors
colleagues
I mourn what we could have been, done, celebrated if
I had not decided you were
unworthy
of my love, attention, status.
I mourn us.
Paula M. Kramer
“Former Playboy model Dani Mathers apologizes after body-shaming 70-year-old on Snapchat”
Kelly McCarthy
Good Morning America
May 31, 2017
“In Ronald Reagan era, Mandela was branded a terrorist”
Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchyDC
“How Isaac Wright Jr overturned kingpin conviction & life sentence in prison, exposing widespread police misconduct in New Jersey”
Shari Rose
Blurred Bylines
No Date
“How Margaret Thatcher helped end apartheid – despite herself”
Richard Dowden
The Guardian
April 10, 2013
“Mandela death: How he survived 27 years in prison”
Mike Wooldridge
BBC News
December 11, 2013
“Mandela funeral to bring together world’s most powerful people”
The Guardian
Julian Borger and Daniel Howden
December 6, 2013
“Montgomery Bus Boycott”
Editors
History.com
February 3, 2010, updated June 6, 2019
“Montgomery unveils Rosa Parks statue”
Greg Garrison
AL.com
December 1, 2019
“Our uneven history with South Africa”
Allan Levine
Winnipeg Free Press
December 14, 2013
“Pass laws in South Africa 1800-1994”
South African History Online
“Polaroid & Apartheid: Inside the Beginnings of the Boycott, Divestment Movement Against South Africa”
Democracy Now! (radio news program)
December 13, 2013
“Reagan’s embrace of apartheid South Africa”
Justin Elliott
Salon
February 5, 2011
Rosa Parks: My Story
Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins
New York: Dale Books, 1992
“Rose Parks mourned at Capitol, Oct. 30, 2005
Andrew Glass
Politico
October 30, 2017
“Rosa Parks’ Life After the Bus Was No Easy Ride”
Tyler Tynes
History.com
“Selfish Litterbug Throws Trash Out The Window, Then A Biker Teaches Her A Lesson”
Barbara Diamond
Little Things
No Date
“Sports Diplomacy and Apartheid South Africa”
Alex Laverty
The African File
December 13, 2010
Sun City (protest song)
Artists United Against Apartheid
1985
http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=217
“The Day a Newly Freed Mandela Came to New York”
James Barron
The New York Times
December 6, 2013
“The Mandela Funeral”
Frank McCaffrey
MyMCMedia
December 8, 2013
“The Surprising Republican Civil War That Erupted Over Nelson Mandela and Apartheid”
Sagar Jethani
Policy.Mic
December 5, 2013
“U.N. condemns apartheid in South Africa”
Gary Satanovsky
Famous Daily
November 6, 1962
“Walking Down Rosa Parks Avenue”
Ed Gordon
NPR News & Notes
December 6, 2005
“Wrongfully Convicted Isaac Wright Jr Returns To The Same Courtroom As An Attorney”
Tony Bowles
Medium.com
December 4, 2017
~~~~~
Paula M. Kramer
© 2019 to the present
All rights reserved.
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