Everything happens for a reason

I was listening to an interesting story on NPR this afternoon about a fortune-telling talk show where listeners call in with a question about their lives and the deejay picks a random CD and puts it on shuffle so everyone hears a random song. Then the deejay, Andras Jones, interprets what the song means to the callers' questions. It's called Radio8Ball and the report was kind of humorous. While Jones certainly has his tongue planted firmly in his cheek at times, he does take the divinations seriously. He believes in a sort of "synchronicity," a harmonizing force in the universe that makes the random songs correspond to the listeners' situations. He hoped that his show would help others "get a sense that right now what's happening at this moment is exactly what should be happening at this moment."
It struck me how this popular fatalism lite is viable only within our consumer culture. No one but affluent white Americans could honestly believe it; our biggest crises involve choosing what house to buy or where to send our children to school.
Try telling a Sudanese Christian who just fled his village after the Jingaweit burned his home down, raped his wife and terrorized his children that it's "exactly what should be happening at this moment."