Who's to Blame?

Pick a bad thing that happened. Anything.

It could be something little, like falling in the supermarket and bashing your elbow. Or something big like the Elliot Rodger shooting.

Why is it that the question after any bad thing is always: Whose fault is this?

Is it society? parents? the media? movies? mental illness? poverty? nutrition? aliens? gamma radiation?

http://www.mau.com/Portals/23906/images/shutterstock_71759158.jpg

The finger-pointing and banner waving commences, then dies down. Until the next bad thing. Then it begins again. It gets really ugly.  It turns perfectly good and reasonable people into trolls. And if people were already trolls? Well, they get fed and become fatter, meaner, uglier trolls.

And I have to fight against my own urge to simply shut down and hide from the vitriol.

That's what a lot of us do. We disengage. We give in to the "almighty shrug" (an awesome phrase I read in this article about intersectionality), and thereby free ourselves of responsibility. There's nothing I can do, therefore I will do nothing.  Like Ned Flanders's Mom once said in a very good episode of the Simpsons, "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"

http://deadon.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/the-20-most-cromulent-simpsons-episodes-of-all-time-19/

I get it.

I'm tired, too. But, even if we somehow made it through the chicken-and-egg, house-that-Jack-built world of argument to actually find someone or thing that was definitively to blame, how would that help? How would that keep any particular bad thing from happening again?

Engagement is the only thing that will make a difference. You have to try something.

Maybe if we could all let go of ego just enough to say, "Hey, maybe this isn't about me." If we just stopped worrying about covering our own behinds and worried about leaving a situation better than we found it.

So, I fall in the grocery store. Do I walk away quietly cursing? Do I sue the store? Or do I tell someone about the puddle and help make sure it gets mopped up so no one else falls? The choice is up to you.

NOTE: This post originally appeared on Balancing Act.