September 22, 2005
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I BLAME MY
(Part 1)
I’ve been in extensive psychotherapy for many years now and just yesterday we finally had a major break through: everything that has ever gone wrong in my life is the fault of Tuffy the Tiger.
The year was 1963 and I was five years old. A local television station produced its own children’s show called “Mr. Zing and Tuffy”. Tuffy was a six foot tall talking tiger and I worshipped him. On each episode of the show, about 30 local children sat on bleachers in the studio to watch the antics of Mr. Zing and Tuffy in person. For my birthday, my parents arranged for me to be on the show. During that show Tuffy was greeting all the children and when he got to me I noticed that he had screen mesh where his eyes were supposed to be. I could see inside the eyes enough to tell that Tuffy was actually just a person inside a costume. I was crushed. I was so crushed, in fact, that when he asked my name, I was unable to respond and just sat there starring into his damn screen-eyes.
The next day at school all of my friends who saw me on TV teased me because I was unable to say my name. Apparently, they already knew that Tuffy wasn’t real…those uppity kindergarten bastards! My self esteem was crushed beyond repair.
This, of course, led to every future failure in my life. It was Tuffy’s fault that I didn’t get the girl. It was Tuffy’s fault that I dropped the ball in the big game. It was Tuffy’s fault that I didn’t get the promotion. And that embarrassing incident involving erectile dysfunction?…you guessed it, it was all Tuffy’s fault.
Now that I’ve been able to assign blame for all of life’s difficulties, I will finally be able to function as a productive citizen.
We appear to have a national obsession with laying blame. I certainly understand this because it’s human nature. If something bad happens we want to be able to point the finger at someone. I think this is why so many people subscribe to the “everything happens for a reason” philosophy. The idea that random horrible things can happen to good people is just too frightening a concept; there has to be a higher purpose for what seems like indiscriminate suffering.
I personally don’t subscribe to that philosophy, because in my mind that would make God one sick, twisted fuck; but I do understand the need to lay blame.
The problem I see is not in the laying of blame. If someone screws up and they are clearly at fault, they should be blamed and they should take responsibility for their actions. The problem is that assigning blame often seems to be the only point. We seem satisfied once blame is assigned and we don’t push for any real change beyond that point. Once we can point a finger, our moral outrage has been satiated and we simply go on our merry way.
My favorite so far is the group that said they mapped out the locations of clinics in
I will have to admit that I was impressed that Bush took responsibility for the poor governmental response to Katrina. Does this mean that anything will actually change? Will we a do a better job in the future? Will our response tomorrow be different when it’s million dollar homes that are destroyed rather than clapboard shotgun houses? Or are we just happy that that blame has been assigned so that now we can go back to business as usual? Time will tell.
Many will take the argument I just laid out to point to the poor victims of Katrina and say they should take responsibility for themselves and that the government has no responsibility to give them a thing. I’ve heard lots of “I worked my way up from the dirt and made something out of myself, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to give a thing to those lazy welfare cheats” kind of statements. I’ll address that loving attitude in part 2.
In the meantime, I still have a small stuffed version of Tuffy and he sits on a shelf in my closet. I’ll bet he’s really to blame for Katrina.
Comments (10)
My view: Part of the reason Humans worship deities is the need to convince ourselves that our sufferings have some higher, noble purpose. No one likes to believe a loved one’s death was just random chance, or that a hurricane demolished their home for no particular reason at all.
So many of the faithful just shrug their shoulders and ascribe everything bad, and good, to “God’s will.” Unfortunately that attitude also keeps some from looking for other reasons. After all, why bother finding out if global warming makes hurricanes stronger if it’s all just “God’s will” anyway?
Wow.
“the problem is that assigning blame often seems to be the only point. We seem satisfied once blame is assigned and we don’t push for any real change beyond that point. Once we can point a finger, our moral outrage has been satiated and we simply go on our merry way.”
I see this at work all the time, nobody is really looking for a solution – they just want to lay the blame somewhere when it fails.
Someone needs to stand up and say “okay that didnt work, lets find out what will.” but, then many times a committee is formed and we never hear from them again……….so people lose faith in finding a solution, and laying the blame seems to be the only thing people can actively participate in.
Hey, that idea of wearing a wedding ring – hmmmmm, I’m gonna give that a try
…LOL
Amen brother! I think the God’s will issue as described by Bad Dogma is akin to what I call the “Ah YA YAY” sindrome. As in a recent patient I had that called me to the ER so I could translate for her even though it had nothing to do with her work related injury. She was “Ah YA YAYing” all over the place, and when I finally got her to calm down she explained that she was in the ER because “God” had decided to take her baby to heaven. Thinking that the infant must have died of SIDS or something, I asked the ER nurse what was going on. It appears the infant, which my patient had been holding in her arms while in the car, rather than placing her in the car seat, had been ejected from the car during an accident! Gods will? Really? Yet, as much as I wanted to shake her and demand an explanation to such stupidity, I had only to look at her anguished face to see that she knew exactly whose fault it was and that she would have to live with that the rest of her life. Other than hold her and let her cry her eyes out, there was nothing more to be said. God’s will indeed!
Your Tuffy is cutems!
When Nell was three, she sat on Santa’s lap at the mall and told him what she wanted for Christmas. Grandma took her to another Santa the following week. He asked what she wanted for Christmas. She said, “I already told you. At the other mall,” and shrugged her shoulders. Santa, bless his soul, said, “Tell me again. I gotta check my list twice to get it right.”
hi mark–
was browsing the members of “i eat republicans for breakfast” and luckily stumbled upon this site. youve got some great entries on here that reflect some hard thinking but you’re not afraid to laugh at yourself. always a good combination. good to read.
–lauren
I agree that when we don’t know, or when we can’t accept what we do know we can find or evade answers by pointing to the will of God. I too can not imagine a God who would fashion our reality as riddled with suffering as it is..that God would be as cruel as a humans at war among the innocents. With regard to blame I also agree that while it may satisfy it does not heal. That takes a different approach. When my kids were little , if a problem existed and it was a situation where “blame”‘ could be assigned I would stress to them that accepting responsibility was the first step to solving a problem.I would point out that we all make mistakes..the idea being that your self- esteem should not crumble under the weight of your human ability to screw things up..and this then frees you to fix a problem instead of defending your character.Presidents make mistakes on a grand scale..and they have help.. but the question now is how the heck do we fix this mess?Thats hard to focus on because its a difficult situation to deal with….and like that mother we may never completely mend.
i’d blame that mr. zing. he’s freaky looking.
yeah. Mr Zing is creepy. Be glad you didn’t tell them your name. Zing probably searched for those children and ate them with with his Ovaltine.
I once thought that perhaps I was suffering from a crisis of faith, but you can’t be pissed at someone if you don’t believe they exist, so I’m thinking that wasn’t the problem, after all. And I also have a hard time believing that God just jerks us around like pieces on a chessboard, even though if you believe what you read, he does seem to toss out some pretty arbitrary tests to his followers. (Jonah, Abraham, Jesus in the desert)
I think that as humans, we’re looking for ways to make it all “make sense”, and religion (not necessarily faith) does that for many people. In much the same way that Tuffy does that for you
I typed, deleted and retyped numerous times here, which means that I actually thought about this one, though I’m still not sure it’s sorted out quite right. Knock it off, would ya ?