Stuff happens

Reader question:

Please explain “stuff happens” in this headline: Jeb Bush Shrugs off Oregon shooting: “Stuff happens.”

My comments:

Stuff is the word representing a number of different things you cannot or don’t want to name in full.

For example, you ask a friend before a camping trip: “How can you fit all that stuff into a car?”

Or a young man who explains why he hasn’t a television in his house: “I don’t want one. I don’t want any more furniture. They’re just stuff. They’re just things.”

Anyways, let’s get back to Jeb Bush, the American Republican candidate running for President for 2016. When he shrugs off the Oregon shooting, in which nine people were killed by a lone gunman in a school, saying “Stuff happens”, he was simply saying “Things happen”.

It’s that simple. He means to say, bad things happen. I don’t mean for them to happen. Nobody wants them to happen but they do. There’s nothing we can do about stuff happening. So let’s forget it, forget this particular tragedy and move on.

Yeah, it’s that simple. But is it?

Of course not. Gun violence is a huge problem in America and it’s about people and society. The Oregon mass killing, the 45th school killing so far this year, is not a natural disaster like an earthquake or tsunami, or a hurricane. It doesn’t just happen. The guy, for instance, cannot kill without having guns in hand.

So gun control, I mean the lacks thereof, has something to do with it.

All right? Alright. It seems easy for us to say, but apparently not for Jeb, who, as we may infer from his reaction, is pro gun. Jeb doesn’t want more gun control.

Anyways, that is that. Let the issue bother Jeb and other Americans. Here, let’s be satisfied if we can get “Stuff happens” dealt with.

Similar expressions include: “It happens” or “Shit happens”.

Shit, being a four letter word, emphasizes it’s something really bad.

So therefore, to sum up, “stuff happens” is a saying you use when something bad happens and for no particular good reason.

It’s a useful phrase for any bad situation, when bad things happen to society and people.

Not the situation in the case of mass school shooting in Oregon, though. Not when that kind of stuff happens for the 45th time. In that case, Jeb is just wrong.

Here are media examples of “stuff happens”:

1. Declaring that freedom is “untidy,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday the looting in Iraq was a result of “pent-up feelings” of oppression and that it would subside as Iraqis adjusted to life without Saddam Hussein.

He also asserted the looting was not as bad as some television and newspaper reports have indicated and said there was no major crisis in Baghdad, the capital city, which lacks a central governing authority. The looting, he suggested, was “part of the price” for what the United States and Britain have called the liberation of Iraq.

“Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things,” Rumsfeld said. “They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here.”

Looting, he added, was not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. “Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld said.

- Rumsfeld on looting in Iraq: ‘Stuff happens’, CNN.com, April 12, 2003.

2. A woman was critically injured when two pit bulls attacked her Sunday outside her home on Indianapolis’ north side.

Indianapolis police said the victim, Brenda Hill, 68, was taking out her trash when the two dogs blindsided her, 6News’ Derrik Thomas reported.

Animal Care and Control went to Lee Carroll's home nearby and took the dogs, a male and female, away on Monday morning.

“The two dogs got loose from the back yard of the home attacked her and severely mauled her legs,” said Indianapolis police Lt. Jerry Bipus. “One of her legs -- the right leg -- there is bone exposed, severe lacerations.”

Police said it was the first time they had been told of an attack involving dogs from that particular home.

If the dogs are found to have caused serious bodily injury, they will become the city’s property.

“It was an accident, man,” Carroll said. “Stuff happens. I hated that it had to happen.”

- Woman Critically Injured In Pit Bull Attack, TheIndyChannel.com, January 27, 2009.

3. U.S. President Barack Obama, reacting to Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s comment about a mass shooting in Oregon that “stuff happens,” said on Friday the American people should make up their own minds whether the comment was appropriate.

“I don’t even think I have to react to that one. I think the American people should hear that and make their own judgments based on the fact that every couple of months we have a mass shooting and ... they can decide whether they consider that stuff happening,” Obama told a news conference at the White House.

Speaking earlier at an event in Greenville, South Carolina, about Thursday’s Oregon shooting in which nine people were killed, Bush said: “Look, stuff happens, there’s always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something, and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”

- Obama says American people should decide about Bush comment on shooting, Reuters, October 2, 2017.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.