The Blamelessness of AmericaNov 26 '02 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line If anyone flames me for writing this, remember that I didn't write it. The dude with the eyepatch did it. I wrote it only if you like it. So. Does anyone here remember when they were children? Like the rest of us, you probably forgot to do your homework every now and then simply because you got too caught up in the baseball game you were playing with your friends. You made an honest promise to yourself that you would do it later, but later just seemed to drag on and on until it turned into tomorrow. At school. With the teacher standing over your desk with a glare on her face that would have turned Medusa to stone. The sweat is pouring down your forehead, your breathing is heavier and you feel intense heat on your face from blushing over. You need an excuse, any excuse, and you need it now. Just as you've reached that point where you would normally have broken down crying, your thoughts drift to Rover back home. The teacher asks you one last time: Where is your homework? My dog ate it!!! you quickly reply. Alas, clever teach, she wasn't buying. Huh! Like she hadn't heard that one before! And I find myself wrong about that statement. I'm always wrong. Apparently there are several boneheaded teachers who bought that excuse at one time or another. Because too many people these days, all of them grown up, are still in the habit of passing blame to everyone from Rover to McDonald's. It was the one-armed man! Sure, that was Harrison Ford's excuse, but in that case the one-armed man actually did it. Unfortunately, too many people these days have taken the slightly-outside-the-realm-of-possibility thing to heart. If there's a chance that someone else just might be responsible for your stupid mistake, you're likely to take your chances on blaming the space aliens instead of facing the consequences. Of course if it was something seriously stupid like your kid's school about to expel your kid because he brought a squirt gun to school, I don't blame you for trying to bend the rules slightly to reduce his sentence. It's a freakin' squirt gun! The most danger you're in at the end of the barrel of a squirt gun is of getting a little wet. So by all means, fight the powers who run the school! But people are taking their battles against their own problems to a level that's a little out there. It's not as if these guys have a lot of valid excuses either. They're just annoying some giant mega conglomerate which, despite being faceless and evil, is totally innocent in the particular case. Take, for instance, the guy who's suing not one, not two, not three, but four fast food chains. That's right, four! McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and I can't remember the other one (I believe it's Wendy's) are all going through legal nightmares right now because they apparently made their food look just a little too appealing in their advertisments. Yep, this guy got fat off the food of these corporations, and now he's suing them because of it. And I'm wondering which is scarier: That a boneheaded judge actually found a valid case in this guy's air sack, or that this guy is going to serve as a role model, in the years to come, to every nutjob who feels he's been wronged by the world in the slightest way. That's my interpretation of it, anyway. The people who are blaming big corporations either feel that God owes them a favor for such shabby treatment or are just plain bored. You can't do that! It'll lower my self-esteem... ...And I'm a freakin' crybaby who can't take it. Did you know that you can sue other people for emotional damage now? Wow. Had I been aware of this hot little piece of info ten years ago, I'd be richer than Bill Gates. Nothing would have made life sweeter than sitting next to a judge, pointing my accusing finger at my enemies (I had quite a few) and yelling That person is lowering my self-esteem! These emotional damage cases are the dumbest things in the world. Since there's no clear definition as to what could constitute emotional damage, I'm sure it will only be a matter of time until someone milks emotional damage claims for everything they're worth. He'll make a career out of suing everyone who even looks at him cockeyed, and the rain forest would be decimated before anyone would even come close to paying this guy back. Furthermore, we would all lose our first amendment privalages. In fact, people who once used to cheerfully greet me on the streets would never say a word to me out of fear that what they said would make me depressed and I would sue them. The extent as to just what can be called emotional damage is infinite. If you can manipulate this language the way I can, I'm sure you could find something emotionally damaging in a statement like Have a nice day! And what would happen in the schools? The kid can't pass math, so the parents sue the teacher, claiming she's intentionally lowering the kid's self-esteem. This is something that goes back to what I said in my Wussification of America article: Mommy and Daddy coddling Junior and hiding from the fact that there are some things that Junior just doesn't have the aptitude for. Falling ever down the spiral Blamelessness has to be an interesting case for a parent. Try to look at the whole blameless scenario from the child's eyes: On one hand, the parent is always telling Junior that he should always 'fess up when he does something wrong. On the other hand, he's also suing his now-former workplace because his bosses fired him for catching him in the act of doing something very wrong and stupid. This is quite the contradiction. Here Junior is supposed to be honest about everything he's ever done, good or bad. Yet the person who's supposed to be his role model is blaming his company for his low pay (when he's not getting asingle scrap of work done), his bloated weight (when he eats from the donut box every day) and the breakdown of his marriage (when he was caught having sex with the secratary on the copy machine). No, he's not doing anything wrong, the world keeps screwing him over, and now he's spending the money in the new TV fund on lawyers who can convincingly make everything look like the company's fault. Even stupider than the people in these Poor me! cases are the judges. Who lets these people onto the bench? These people are supposed to know every in and out of the legal system, but somehow they manage to keep finding valid cases in these ridiculous claims. Forget what I just said in the self-esteem section, our first amendment privalages are already slowly crumbling away like the parchment they were originally written on. So where to next? When we run out of big companies to blame, I wonder what then. We're already in the process of milking our neighbors because we all know that everything is their fault. I'd love to say that we'd blame the government for everything, but we're doing that too. Hey, I do that all the time (especially since they're partially responsible for a recent public relations nightmare in my community). One thing I do know: Aspiring lawyers will always be able to find work. Everywhere you go, the only talking big corporations will be able to do is through their lawyers. Pretty soon law will wind up being a part-time, minimum wage job. Have I made my point by now? If not, here it is again: We have to start taking responsibility for our own faults. It's not the math teacher's fault I didn't do my homework. It's not the responsibility of fast food restraunts to keep your fat level low. It's not Jack Daniel's fault that you accidentally killed a bunch of innocent bystanders who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's my fault that I didn't do my homework. It's your fault for letting the fast food ads have such a hypnotic impact on you. It's your fault for being stupid enough to drive drunk! For every stupid action there has to be a consequence. Fortunately, I take heart in knowing that the consequences for most of these people is going almost broke paying for a lawyer to sue El Nino. But the risk that the irresponsible nut might actually win is still there, and still too great. Get my point now? If not, it's your fault for being too stupid to comprhend this article. And by the way, I'm well aware of the irony in finger pointing in an article about blamelessness. So don't bother pointing it out. "These days you can sue anyone for pretty much anything and win! Or at least get a settlement!" Radio ad from the video game Grand Theft Auto 3  |
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