Avoiding blame is a great vice, a generative crucible of sins...
In women, especially: I did what you/ they said - so it's not my fault.
In men: You/ they didn't do what I said: so it's not my fault.
The truth is that you are your fault and I am my fault. You life is your responsibility, mine is mine.
We Need Both to take and to acknowledge responsibility.I
6 comments:
Amen. Whether or not it’s your fault is irrelevant when it is your responsibility. The blame game is an appeal to a crooked sense of justice. As I like to ask my nephews when they cry ‘not fair!’—Are you sure you’d like it if it was fair? Be careful what you wish for!
Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?
It's a great thing about Christianity, as I understand it, that we don't have to deserve resurrection and Heaven. Of course, that's also the scandal of it.
The comedian Joey Diaz said that when he was a young criminal he would never accept blame for anything. He says he wakes up in the morning these days, turns on the radio, hears about a traffic accident, and his first thought is, "I did that." Another relevant Joey-ism: "Nobody ever gets away with anything."
@SR. Yes, another aspect of the situation is that people feel paralysing guilt for stuff (fed them via the media) that they cannot effect, yet deny responsibility for their own thinking (including their decision to believe in the truth of the media).
"...people feel paralysing guilt for stuff that they cannot effect, yet deny..."
It's another road to what C.S. Lewis called "the horror and neglect of the obvious", that which we can effect. So unglamorous, so quotidian.
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