Why bad guys win

And why good guys lose

The bad guys have been winning a lot lately, huh?

These are not just your usual bad guys, either. They’re the real deal, the real evil. Bad all over. No room for ambiguity with these folks.

Just when you think they can’t get any badder, there they go again. With all the badness.

For my own sins, I watch wrestling. Yes, that kind of wrestling. Bear with me.

Wrestling is a world of good and bad. Right and wrong. The good guys are the heroes, the characters you’re supposed to look up to, believe in, root for and cheer.

The bad guys, well, they do bad stuff. They betray the good guys. They attack them when their back is turned, gang up on them with their evil friends, and beat them something nasty.

When it comes to the ‘sport’ of this weird world, between the ropes and after the bell rings, the bad guys win more often than not. Why? Well, they cheat of course.

Bad guys in wrestling rarely, if ever, win ‘clean’. They have to use skulduggery of some kind. Whether it’s using a weapon behind the referee’s back, distracting the referee while an accomplice attacks the good guy, or maybe just grabbing their tights when they’re not looking, the bad guys invariably come out on top.

The good guys, meanwhile, can never break the rules. They *have* to win clean, or not win at all.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out why the bad guys usually come out on top.

Don’t get me wrong, the good guys do sometimes triumph. But their wins are invariably hard earned and hard fought and come after many, many noble defeats.

In wrestling, there is no VAR, no reruns or voided contests. A win is a win, however that win is achieved. That means cheating nearly always pays.

Do you see where I’m going with this yet?

I often watch or read the news and just think, fuck, why is the world like this? Why can’t we just all get along? And why is there so much fucking hate?

My own life experience tells me that the bad guys, in the real world, are in a minority. But the few who are out there tend to be pretty visible and pretty influential. They tend, sadly, to be the ones who win. They tend, therefore, to be the ones in charge.

Us good folks have to make do with the mundane jobs and the mundane lives because we’re too damn honest. No, money doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys fame, influence and power and that’s why the bad guys are the ones we read about in the news and watch on the television and see endlessly popping up on that shitty social media they all own and control and that we inexplicably spend hours looking at on our shitty phones every shitty fucking day.

These bad dudes are winning all over the place because they don’t give a solitary fuck about the rules we created to protect ourselves from them.

The referee isn’t just distracted right now, they’re knocked out cold by a chair shot to the head, while all the back-up refs have been tied up in the locker room.

I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but, holy shit. If we can’t find another referee right now these bad guys are going to just keep on fucking winning. And winning. And winning.

Or maybe… us good guys could all gang up together? And… get the tables?

Fuck your rules, man.