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Blame Game

I was watching a TV documentary on creative play writing on PBS, the American Public TV system, the other day and I was struck by the reasons the young people gave for their contributions to the play.

I was watching a TV documentary on creative play writing on PBS, the American Public TV system, the other day and I was struck by the reasons the young people gave for their contributions to the play. The idea was that each person would contribute something to the play based on their life experience. These young people, some in their teens, a few approaching 30 years, were selected for the project because of their troubled pasts with the law or society.   

 Life experience before you are twenty is a bit of an oxymoron but who am I to say that maybe their short time span might be the most influential years for them. For me, those years were perhaps the most dramatic but hardly the years to form one’s philosophy of life. The immediacy of life in this age of instant communication might be the stuff of modern plays and drama but somehow it sounded shallow to me.   

 The theme of the patched-together play seemed to be what happened to me and why I am such a messed-up person. No doubt that some of the events related by the young people were traumatic, dramatic and given their tender years, life altering if serious introspection did not have the advantage of time for resolution. Tagged as the ‘me’ generation, these people did indeed have problems, as their stories would show.   

 The thing that struck me was that they all had someone to blame for their current situation in life. There were many examples of broken homes where Mom and Dad separated or divorced and the then young children were affected by this. A common complaint was that one or the other parent had problems, sometimes medical, sometimes substance abuse, or chronic unemployment. Some said they were sexually or physically abused – never a positive thing in the life experience, and for those I had some sympathy. One blamed her father for committing suicide and I would have liked to hear his side of the story. However, throughout their biographical backgrounds in the introductions, they all had something in common: someone to blame.   

Blaming someone or something for our short-comings or lack of success is nothing new. In ancient times when they had several different gods in charge of the different aspects of our lives, people could focus their blame (or thanks) on the god in charge. In the Western world that changed when the folks fired all the gods except one although some still cling to the idea of a split deity and blame the ‘devil’ for making them ‘do it’. I guess it is human nature to blame someone else for our misdeeds and mistakes.   

 Now we particularly like to assign blame to the heads of state, mayors and anyone we voted for in the last election. Failing that, parents are a good target or without them, siblings and former friends.  We use modern lyrics, books and art as an expression of blame and failure. Country and Western lyrics are famous for this although I am never certain if they are joking or not when they whine about their old truck breaking down and their dog running away.   

 Anyway, back to the PBS project. They put together a reasonably coherent script of their trials and tribulations that could be classified as a tragedy unless Act II brought in some comic relief. Perhaps part II of the project would be to gather a group of happy young people and let them tell their stories. While these people were rapping about their early life philosophies I thought about that 16th century rapper, Will Shakespeare who in his play Julius Caesar wrote, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’      

 Cassius’ advice might apply to many of us who find it so quick and easy to criticize others or blame our own shortcomings on external forces or even lesser gods. Now if only Boreas, the god of the north wind would give way to Zephyrus, we could stop blaming the past winter weather for all our problems!





Bill Walton

About the Author: Bill Walton

Retired from City of North Bay in 2000. Writer, poet, columnist
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