Paying for the deeds of others

It is said that each one of us pays for our deeds with consequences. Fair enough. This is what most of us are taught regardless of our religious persuasions. Do good, sow the seed, reap the harvest, what goes around comes around. But is it really true?
What about when we are paying with consequences for the deeds of others that have no connection to us but overwhelm us with the power of the ripple effect. How do we justify that?
The Palestinian children killed in Gaza were not guilty of anything but being born. The thousands fleeing Syria had opted to bring up families, earn their daily bread and live out their lives with grace and dignity, not trek across a continent with their babies and all their worldly possessions in their arms.
The Yemen casualties whose only fault was that they were in the path of a guided missile and yet, had no truck with the violence visited upon them uninvited. Two days ago a rocket fired by the Houthis killed 24 civilians in the town on Taez — nameless, unmourned, just statistics in a ledger.
The poor breadwinner strung up in India for ostensibly eating beef because someone said so and it turned out to be mutton. You cannot bring him back. The young Muslim boy in America who took a clock he had made to school and was held on suspicion of being a bomb and now his family intends to get over the trauma by shifting to Qatar where the boy will study without being profiled and having to answer for it.
Every day, thousands of men, women and children suffer the consequences of other people’s actions even though they have no direct connection. So, if we see it from this perspective we are made responsible for the actions of strangers to the extent that they affect us directly. Not only made responsible but also asked to pay with sacrifice and blood and life without any stake in the proceedings.
It is indeed a cruel and unfair world. And it is not only at the macro national level where governments turn humans into cannon fodder, it is even in our day-to-day lives. A manic driver runs over a pedestrian or is involved in a horrific collision after he loses control of his vehicle. All because he wanted to save two minutes and took away a lifetime.
Think of it. Every four minutes someone dies in a traffic accident, this being the single largest cause of death for people aged 16 to 29, even more than disease and war.
If we are able to understand that even if someone is 10 times removed from the core act he or she might have to pay for a decision we would be a lot more cautious and a lot less cavalier in taking a specific step whether we are kings or commoners.