Karma: not just what goes around, comes around
Montserrat Camacho
The idea of secularized, new age karma is having its moment in the limelight.
Newspapers and magazines use the word to spice-up headlines with colorful flair. Restaurants plaster their tip jars with signs promising good karma for only a dollar or two.
Karma has unquestionably been transplanted from Eastern religion to Western pop culture in past decades and has reached a very high popularity among Westerners.
“Whenever I think of karma, I think of the famous saying ‘what goes around comes around,'” said MCC student Diego Fernandez.
Patrice Nango, a world religions and philosophy teacher at MCC, described the fateful term as a predominant belief held by Eastern religions and said it consisted basically of “actions having consequences.”
“I also know that karma is the [belief] that doing bad things will make bad consequences go back at you,” said Diep Ta, another MCC student.
Fernandez agreed and said that he was “born believing in karma” because he thinks that everything and everyone has good or bad vibes.
“[Karma] is simply a law that maintains a balance between actions and consequences,” said Fernandez.
Ta described karma as having two sides, the good and the bad.
“Good karma is doing good things and receiving rewards for doing it; bad karma is doing mean things and basically your life would suck with all the bad consequences being bombarded at you,” said Ta.
On the other hand, Cunningham described karma as neutral; not having a specific good or bad side, but rather just having consequences come back at you.
“Whenever something bad happens to me I start thinking of karma, and start thinking about what I could have possibly done wrong,” said MCC student Yadira Cunningham. “For example, once I rejected a guy that I didn’t like and then when I liked someone, he rejected me and the first thing that came to my mind was karma.
