There is so much pain in the world! Some of it is unavoidable, obviously. We are embodied and mortal, prey to sorrows and afflictions of the flesh, and nature can be disastrous, and if we don't die young, we get old, and that isn't easy. Life is a heart-breaker in so many ways at the same time that it is the gift that makes all other gifts possible. But must we make it harder on ourselves and each other?
Our nature as animals who speak and imagine and live in time is to personify the world. We see the sun and rain as benevolent, destructive storms as malicious. A forest may appear either as friendly or dangerous, depending on experience and knowledge. Ancient Greeks explicitly named gods of wind and sea and land, gods endowed with all the petty vanities and jealousies and angers of the human beings who invented them.
The stimulus of pain—“I am hurt!”—triggers an almost automatic response in many people: “Who is to blame?” We want to identify a responsible other, then to inflict pain on that other, as if hurting someone else will ease our own pain, somehow “even out” the score and erase the hurt done to us. It doesn’t work, but when it comes to hurt and blame, the most modern, educated human beings revert to primitive feelings, the human brainstem remaining—necessarily—as active as it ever was. Sometimes we identify a specific human being as the one who hurt us, but often that isn’t possible, so we look for a group or people or agency and make them into villains.
Ironically, one person’s villain is often another person’s angel, because each of us has only our own experiences, no one else’s. Each of us has only our own pain, our own losses, no one else’s. Designs to help can fail to meet everyone’s needs. Even people who love us may occasionally let us down, and a person with the best intentions cannot foresee all consequences.
All that is hard to accept because we want justice. People who don’t deserve to die — they die! It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair, but it’s life.
The biggest problem with blaming and scapegoating is that it not only fails to erase hurt: it spreads it further. Blame and revenge are as contagious as plague.
Now some would say—and one or two have said—that my identifying the current president of our country as the blamer-in-chief is blaming him, and isn’t that exactly what I’m saying we shouldn’t do? If I’m truly tolerant, they imply, I would tolerate intolerance. No. That is a road I refuse to go down.
Harry Truman said, taking full responsibility for the high office he occupied, “The buck stops here.” People going into politics knows at the start that not everything they say or do will be popular and that their words and deeds will be criticized. Criticism goes with the job. Taking criticism is part of the job. Name-calling, vilifying your opposition, attempting to silence critics, blaming others for your failures, on the other hand — none of that is part of the job.
This president has tarnished the reputation of our country around the world. He is doing everything possible to destroy our “Fourth Estate,” the free press, because honest journalists refuse to be his parrots. He is purging government of experts and career professionals and replacing them with parrots loyal only to him. He is “firing” judges whenever he can, if they hand down verdicts he doesn’t like (replacing them whenever possible with parrots). He is deporting people who are legally in our country and threatening to strip citizens of their citizenship.
HE, the PRESIDENT, is doing all these things. Do you not think these offenses are a thousand times worse than King George III’s tax on tea?
THE BUCK STOPS IN THE OVAL OFFICE.
