nineteen minutes. the world isn't meant to be fair.

I am currently reading Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. I was tempted to read the book because of its opening paragraphs:

"In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five.
Nineteen minutes is how long it took the Tennessee Titans to sell out of tickets to the play-offs. It's the length of a sitcom, minus the commercials. It's the driving distance from the Vermont border to the town of Sterling, New Hampshire.
In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed. You can walk a mile. You can sew a hem.
In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it.
In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge."

And then the story goes.

Basically, it's a story about a boy named Peter who is bullied, who takes a revenge by committing a massacre in his school, killing those people who were mean to him. And then, because he committed a hideous crime like that, he is being jailed, I think for life. I haven't finished reading everything (I took a peek to the last part. Shh.).

The troubling issue that I just thought about and decided to jot it down here is:
The boy killed the people who picked on him in the past. But he is the one being punished. They were the one who started it, were they not?

It's like, those people did something bad to him, so he does something bad to them in return. But what he did was murder, whereas what those people did to him was maybe, making fun of him, sneering and jeering at him all the time. You can call it making life hell for him.

Why is a murder worse than those things?

A lot of people who are abused, being beaten up everyday, enslaved, or suffering from an excruciatingly painful terminal illness may say that death is more appealing than living in this world with these burden being put on their shoulders. Death is peaceful, it is even easier to die than to fall asleep (a saying from Remus Lupin or Sirius Black from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I forgot who said it, and the exact words).

Why were the people who made life hell for Peter never get punished? Whereas Peter, who did what he thought he needed to do to stop the torment, get to be punished? The suffering Peter experienced during his life continued without anybody preventing it from happening to him. Even his mother can be considered as doing the wrong thing to make him able to stand up for himself (by threatening to punish him if he didn't fight back). What he wanted was that the torture stop, so he can live in peace and happiness.

I thought. It is not fair. Peter suffered for don't know how many years, and now he get to be jailed for life because he stopped the bullying towards himself, forget about how he did it.

What is wrong, I think, is how people ignore the suffering other people may be experiencing. What comes out in the headline is when the tormented person does something in order to protect himself, sometimes to extreme measures, eg. what Peter did. The things they do to him are never acknowledged, right? They just let it go without offering a helping hand to the bullied, instead sometimes some people helped tormenting him.

If only someone helped Peter get out of the bullying, they all can live happily ever after. Everyone can.

Help those female suicide bombers in Pakistan, please, someone. Before they become martyrs.