Finding someone to blame seems to be a cherished pastime for some people. They seem to believe it is an end unto itself as if assigning blame wraps up the issue and brings closure. Outside of lawsuits assigning blame doesn’t do much that is worthwhile. It may feel like it does but in practical terms it really doesn’t.
Mostly what blame provides is a false sense of absolution. Finding someone else at fault gives us the mistaken idea that we are free from responsibility for the situation. This is where it gets messy. It doesn’t change the reality that we have a piece of the work to do, it just gives us the illusion that we are off the hook. Responsibility is sometimes a hard thing and when we find a way to avoid it some of us jump right on that.
While someone else may be the reason something awful happened, and we had no part in the creation of the mess, we are still responsible to do what we can to make things right. It’s not on us to do the other person’s part for them but we also can’t foist our portion onto them because they were the genesis of the problem.
Two years ago Number Five graduated from high school. We had given her the 2003 Saturn Ion that Mr. Wonderful used to commute to the city for years. She was all set to spend the summer having fun, driving herself and her friends places, and then taking that car to college. At 4:30am on July 4th a neighbor of ours drove home seriously drunk. As he came barreling down our hill he crashed into the Saturn. It was parked right in front of our house and he hit it with such force he moved it more than seventy feet. With his front end smashed in and his bumper lying in front of our house, he kept driving. He took out a few garbage cans and tore up another neighbor’s lawn only stopping a hundred yards away when his engine failed. The noise woke the neighborhood. Number Five was so upset.
By assigning blame and shifting all responsibility onto another person we do more than just absolve ourselves. We give away our power to improve the situation. We unwittingly become trapped in the problem. The person responsible for the mess becomes the person required to clean it up and until that happens nothing changes, nothing improves.
Our drunk-driving neighbor was clearly wrong. He was to blame for the damage to her car, our mailbox, our neighbor’s garbage cans and lawn. If we responded to this the way so many choose to respond to personal damage we would have walked back into the house righteously angry with our inebriated neighbor and satisfied in our right to that anger. Yes, this mess was all his fault and, if we absolved ourselves of any responsibility because of that, the Saturn would still have been disabled and leaking gasoline. Our mailbox would still have been uprooted. We would be angry and waiting for someone else to fix it for us. This tactic doesn’t work.
You can hold someone responsible for the mess they create while doing what you can to put your life back together yourself. You can be angry with someone because their carelessness or callousness caused you pain and misery and you can still pick yourself up and deal with the fallout. It’s not an all or nothing situation. It’s important to know who causes problems in your life and you have every right to expect another adult to behave like an adult and to make amends for the things they’ve done that screwed up your life. You owe it to yourself to not hang on a hook waiting for that to happen. You owe it to yourself to do what you have to take care of yourself and set your world right again regardless of who knocked it sideways.