Two days ago, a 21-year-old man walked into a church in South Carolina. He sat with a group of people that were unlike him in one or two ways, but just like him in a million others. He sat there for an hour before he raised his gun to shoot them, killing nine of those people.
And, again, a nation is talking. We are talking about mental illness and terrorism and guns and god and race and a million other things. We'll talk for the next week or so... and then we'll stop talking. Some celebrity will do something outrageous or someone will say something that will be overanalyzed by talking heads. And a few weeks from now, this young man from South Carolina will go down in the long list of cold-blooded killers we have seen and his trial, his imprisonment, perhaps his execution...all of that won't matter anymore.
Right now, we stand here as a country and we all want to ask him why... but I think we all know the answer. It's actually the same answer over and over again, but we can't seem to hear it. It's not about mental illness and it's not about guns and it's not even really about race. It's about blame.
In that moment, the million things he had in common faded away, and the one thing that made them different than them came into focus for him. This young man was searching for answers in his life... like so many of us do. We question our lives... why things have to be so hard... and we find something, or someone, to blame.
We blame republicans for being heartless
We blame liberals for spending too much money
We blame gay people for using the term marriage
We blame Christians for limiting science education
We blame Jews for occupying Isreal
We blame Muslims for causing wars
We blame atheists for taking god out of schools
We blame immigrants for taking our jobs
We blame men for limiting women's job potential
We blame women for getting child support
We blame poor people for using community resources
We blame rich people for not giving to community resources
We blame the middle class for being entitled
We blame anti-vaccine believers for diseases
We blame pharmaceutical companies for diseases
What is interesting to me, in all of this, is that not one of these things is real. They are all reasoned away with particulars, but are never scaled for accuracy. They are sound bites. They are never about the individuals but are instead an evolution of a story into a stereotype.
When I think about this young man, I think about his story... the story I don't know for sure, and I can see it. A young man, likely trying to scale the wall of poverty that exists for both black and white in South Carolina. Education was a struggle for him... there could have been a lot of reasons for that. But, overall, the systems that we as a society designed for him were failing. He was aimless and struggling. And somewhere along the way, someone said something to him that helped him focus. Someone told him that there was someone to blame. And for a person like him- a person who has all of the privileges of being white and all of the weight of being poor- the ability to blame likely felt like a relief to him.
As blame often does at first.
We all yearn for the ability to be free from the consequences of our actions, because shame is an awful feeling, and owning up to our own shortcomings is a daily reminder that not only are we flawed, but we are expected to work harder and dig deeper and overcome. Blame is easier.
So, I imagine that this young man has spent the past year watching the news coverage, reinforcing these ideas that there is someone out there to blame. He watches as others who have placed blame get a spotlight. He sees other people who might not share his story, but they echo his sentiment. People call black folks animals. Statements about the welfare state and black kids with XBoxs. His government flies a flag that memorializes a country that existed for four years and call it heritage. A girl he likes goes out with a black guy and it wears at his already-wavering self-esteem. He stops seeing people and starts seeing this all as a war against him and the life he could have had.
This young man's story is just like a million other people's story. It's about who is to blame. A cop starts to see young black men as a threat, then the young black men see the police as a threat. Neither of them see the person, they simply see the blame and it makes them feel better- for the moment.
I am just as much a victim of this mentality. I am a female, anti-religion, liberal, middle class asshole who believes in evolution, gun control, lgbt equality, and immigration reform. I don't blame gays for destroying my marriage.... but I blame Christians for a gay kid who kills himself. I am against the death penalty and don't want this kid to be executed for his crimes, but I blame republicans for this kid having a firearm in the first place. I don't think that immigrants are trying to steal american jobs, but I blame the government for turning it's back on the mexican government's response to drug cartels. I have no issue with pornography or sex on television, but I blame the media for putting out photoshopped images of women my daughter will never look like.
I have my own blame, and while my blame may not have the same results as others, the root is the same. The blame has to stop.
Today, I was trying to explain to my eight-year-old daughter the difference between a good person and a bad person. The truth is that it's not a clear line. Good people are good until they aren't anymore, and bad people are bad... until they aren't anymore. The best I could come up with is this:
Good people are good when they don't give up and don't stop trying. Bad people are bad because they give up... they stop trying.... they make the decision that what they want to have isn't worth the effort, and it's better to just blame and take from someone else. And each of us does bad things, until we decide to try again.
So, I'm going to stop the blame. I'm going to stop blaming others for my lot in life... because that is what I would have told that young man if I had been given the opportunity. I'm going to stop blaming my Catholic Education for my feelings about spirituality. I'm going to stop blaming men because of that guy who inappropriately touched me when I was 13. I'm going to stop blaming the rich for the lot of the poor. I'm going to stop blaming everyone for my failures.
I'm going to stop blaming because there is blame enough to go around. We all failed this kid, and we all failed his victims because none of us stopped blaming others long enough to notice that HIS blame was a problem. And, for the next couple weeks, we will go around in circles on who to blame. His dad who gave him a gun? His mom who didn't help him with his drug problem? I'm already seeing it, and it'll only get worse... and we'll miss the next kid who is coming down the line... he's watching those talking heads and that social media chatter right now. He's watching as we blame each other, and we are currently reinforcing some idea in his head. The kid could be white, and he'll blame Obama's speech. Or the kid could be black, and he's blaming the media for calling this kid mentally ill. We are breeding this... we are creating the Petri dish of blame that grows into the hate we see before us.
And I'm going to work really hard to not let this something else that fades into the background in a week or two, when I am tempted to blame a conservative Christian homeschool family for distorted sexual norms or to blame the attachment parenting mom down the street for a measles outbreak in Colorado. Because I have to understand that my blame, at best, is just me giving up... and at worse is me reinforcing the blame for someone else who might not be equipped to handle it.
The real problem is blame. Stop the blame.
