Fate, Coincidence, and the Twitterpated--Curmudgeon's Corner (10)

      Smokey Burner, the Broken Stove's resident curmudgeon, has been Twittering for a while now, and mostly he likes it. Twitter lets him keep up with the daily doings of his friends, and also allows him to brush up against the goings-on of various other people he finds interesting. In moderation, it's a good thing.
      But Twitter also has the unfortunate side effect of reminding Smokey that, as a friend once explained to him, the masses are asses (Smokey already knew this instinctively, but he had never before heard his belief so artfully encapsulated in words). Today, Twitter is all aflutter with the sad story of Johanna Gunthaler, an Italian woman who escaped death on Air France Flight 447 by arriving late at the counter, only to be killed today in a car crash in Austria.
      "Fate," intone a distressingly large number of the tweets on the subject, "she couldn't escape Fate," "it was her time to die," "it's just like the Final Destination movies," and on and on and on. Of course what these purblind doomsters fail to mention, or even notice, is that her husband didn't die in the car crash. Shouldn't he be doomed as well? And I seem to recall reading that there were a handful of other would-be passengers of Flight 447 who only avoided being on the plane by the coincidence of being bumped, or waiting for a later flight, or whatever. Why aren't these people hurtling off various roads in their ill-fated cars? What's the statute of limitations on Inescapable Fated Death? If they die of heart attacks in three years, will people still tsk and say, "they were meant to die on that plane"?
      Don't be so twitterpated. "A" happens. Then "B" happens. It does not automatically follow that "B" was directly caused by "A", no matter how oddly reminiscent of "A" that "B" turns out to be. Johanna Gunthaler's story is strange and sad, but it's not Fate Writ Large.