If you’ve spent any amount of time around a little kid, you very likely heard a standard response to some action taken that the youngster doesn’t like – “that’s not fair!” Indeed, that response, and a demand that life be fair, is pretty darn near universal in the human species. We want things to be fair; fairness is highly regarded as a standard that we should strive for. And even when we tell the young person something along the lines of “that’s tough, because life isn’t fair,” we still feel a bit of a twinge of regret that fairness isn’t found more often in our society.

A couple of things brought fairness to mind recently. First, I’ll let you know that after eight years of refereeing high school football and some basketball, I’ve decided to step away from that line of work. I’ll likely write a full column on the vile treatment officials get from parents (especially), coaches, far too many kids, and others. It’s amazing to me what people yell at folks wearing striped shirts, and I suspect that this increasingly uncivil behavior parallels nicely with a certain former president who continues to spout big lies and to be, well, a terrible bully. But that’s for another column.

If you asked the folks screaming at us officials – if you could get them to calm down – they might well say that our lousy job officiating is, well, not fair. There are many factors at work here, a major one of which is that the parents don’t know the high school rules (there are nearly 300 rule differences between high school and college football). And far too many parents think their kid will make it to the NFL someday. But I bet they’d argue that all their screaming was really all about fairness, despite the f-bombs they rain down on the officials. So, my soon-to-be-over officiating career reminded me of fairness in our society, and it certainly isn’t found too often on Friday nights at local high schools.

I was also reminded of the same fairness issue when reading a recent story in Colorado Politics. It seems a group of 18 or so avid skiers took Vail Resorts to court, arguing that the ski company had violated their contract with the skiers to provide “unlimited” skiing, when the slopes were closed early due to COVID and the pandemic. But last week, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, saying the resort was within its rights to operate their facilities in a manner they deemed to be safe. When safe conditions could not be provided (cough…pandemic…cough) the folks at Vail Resorts shut things down in what I would certainly consider a reasonable and proper manner. The judge ruled that COVID was very much like if a spring thaw comes early and snow on the slopes melts away – if you can’t ski safely, you can’t ski.

I bet the folks who sued are nice people who just want to get their money’s worth out of the big bucks they paid for their season passes. Not letting them ski, even in the face of an epidemic of far-too-often fatal virus, wasn’t, well, fair. And as I said above, we humans, from an early age, want things to be fair.

And if they are not fair, we want to have someone to blame. The ski resort shut things down, so they must be to blame, right? And in football, if your team loses by 50 points, it can’t be that that other team was better, rather, it was the referees that were at fault for being unfair. After all, somebody must be at fault, right?

Recall please the recent departure from Afghanistan. While President Biden could certainly have done things better, fundamentally a 20-plus year commitment of US military forces had not been able to create an Afghan army that could stand up to, well, anything. I’d ask those who said we left too soon how many more years, and how much more blood and treasure, the American people should have expended? I’d say 20 years is enough. If it can’t get fixed by then, well, it is unfixable. And who is to blame?

The GOP want to say it is Biden. But Biden isn’t the president who signed the deal with the Taliban to get all our folks out of the country. That was former president Trump, who actually negotiated an earlier deadline than the one Biden eventually used to get everyone out. Had Trump won the 2020 election (which, again, he didn’t), he would have pulled the Americans out even faster and likely with even more chaos. I’m guessing the Republicans in the House and Senate would not be trying to blame Trump as they are now trying to blame Biden.

Sometimes, as you dear readers know, things are just not really any one person’s fault, and they are often unfair. It’s not fair that COVID cut into the ski season, and it’s not fair that the Afghan army couldn’t fight. Lots and lots of things are not fair. Heck, as a retired military officer I can assure you that we in the armed forces never want a “fair fight” with an enemy. We want overwhelming force which is, it can be said, not fair.

While fairness is a standard that appeals to most everyone, and which we teach our kids is a fundamental goal, there are times and places where the concept doesn’t really mean anything. I’m sorry the nice people who wanted to ski more didn’t get to, and I’m sorry that a kid running out for the long pass dropped the ball when I didn’t throw a flag. But sometimes things happen that are not anyone’s fault.

Fairness is a great goal, but sometimes we just must accept that stuff happens. Darn.