The Blame Game

The Blame Game

The shooting in Orlando came as I was reading Divine Mistress (wisdom being the mistress the main character was besotted by rather than a woman) by Frank G. Slaughter. The horrible irony of the name chills me as does the subject. Set in the mid-1600s, the main character, a morally upright physician, faces the Spanish Inquisition, charged with healing by the power of Satan when he uses scientific breakthroughs not condoned by the Catholic Church that are therefore heretical. In Spain at that time, it was considered sinful to touch dead bodies for autopsy or medical research.

We have not evolved far from the Inquisitors who lauded torture as an acceptable means to force sinners—those who disagreed with the Church—to confess and repent their heretical beliefs. Many today believe water-boarding, an ancient torture technique from that era, is an acceptable means to gain information from our enemies. And, obviously, too many think it is acceptable, even necessary, to shoot those we don’t like.

The History of Scape Goats

The Inquisition, the Salem witch trials where people were hung on the strength of accusations, mostly from young girls, often against those who had caused community upsets of one type or another, and where the majority of people, fearing being accused themselves, either said nothing against the injustice of the trials or made up their own accusations to push the spotlight away from themselves. The Communist witch hunts of another type in the fifties destroyed or at least derailed careers based on accusations, names often added to the list of the accused by those pressured by the authorities to save themselves.

Heretics, witches, Jews, Communists, Blacks, the Irish, the Chinese, Muslims, homosexuals—and this is here in the US—handy titles throughout history on which to hang our fears and insecurities. No jobs, feeling powerless? It’s their fault. If titles don’t apply, we settle for attributes—the nerds, the overweight, overly short, overly tall—take your pick. No one gets a pass. We all do or have done this, even if just momentarily and on a personal scale, against a spouse, a sibling, someone driving too slow or too fast. How much does it take to push us past looking down on someone on the personal scale to an entire nationality or widespread attribute?  

Repeating the Past

We have a natural preference or bias for what we grow up with, for the familiar, a benign prejudice, which in itself is harmless. These biases only become problematic when we fail to appreciate or respect the right of others to have different beliefs and biases, judge them unfavorably for not sharing ours, or use those differences as excuses to treat them as less than.   

Human nature tends to look for others to blame for the problems we see in our world—why, I suspect, some blame God for allowing the non-ending, violent power-grasping often justified as done in the name of the greater good, though usually about the personal power of those advocating this kind of action. Free will can be a bitter pill to swallow.

Anger, a byproduct of fear, clouds our judgment. Blaming others for our misfortunes gives us a target for all that anger and a perverse comfort. The condition of the world is not our fault, not our responsibility. What can one person do? is the historical cry for not becoming involved. Realistically, not everyone can be involved on a national or even town-wide scale. We all can treat our little corner of the world and the people in it as we wish to be treated ourselves. Take care of that one corner and, like ripples in a pond, watch it spread and grow.