You Have a Mind of Your Own, Why Don’t You Use It?

The Seemingly Incurable Viral Blame Game

I see where everyone is call­ing for ban­ning as­sault weapons again. Folks on the left are blam­ing the folks on the right for al­low­ing such weapons to be pur­chased by young peo­ple. Well, not so much young peo­ple as young men. So far, there have not been any young women mass mur­der­ers. And then the peo­ple on the right are crying in their beer about the left want­i­ng to take away their guns. I mean, how will they ever be able to wage a race war against the hoard of brown peo­ple charg­ing north to re­place them? Here’s the part that both­ers me the most. It isn’t that guns are the rea­son some­one picks one up and uses it to right a per­ceived wrong. It’s that we as a so­ci­ety think that we have an in­alien­able right to blame some oth­er per­son or group for our prob­lems. It’s le­gal to do the blame thing, but it’s just plain dumb.

I grew up with guns. We used them to kill things like deer and squir­rels and oth­er game. We killed hogs with a 22. We shot preda­tors with a 12 gauge, but never once in my life did I ever hear of any­one us­ing a gun to hunt peo­ple to right a per­ceived wrong. Cider Bill used a shot­gun to kill him­self one Sun­day morn­ing just as his wife and kids got home from church, but there was a rea­son he was called Cider Bill and that Sun­day it was ru­mored that he had ar­rived at the bot­tom of the bar­rel both lit­er­al­ly and fig­u­ra­tive­ly.

Guns are used more of­ten to kill one­self than they are to com­mit mass mur­der. The last time sta­tistics are avail­able there were 24,292 deaths by self-in­flict­ed gunshot in a sin­gle year¹. In 2019 there were 1,526 deaths due to mass shoot­ings. The num­ber of deaths due to an ac­tive shoot­er be­tween 2000 and 2017 was 2,217. I don’t hear peo­ple of­fer­ing thoughts and prayers for any of the more than 24,000 peo­ple who died due to self-in­flict­ed wounds. Why is that?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I want to hear any­one blame the oth­er side for some­thing that nei­ther side gives a hap­py damn about. Reg­u­lat­ing guns will not stop peo­ple from com­mit­ing sui­cide nor will it keep dumb kids from thinking that God has spoked to them, and only them, to take it upon them­selves to hero­ical­ly mur­der a bunch of peo­ple in cold blood that they don’t even know. Those kids are blam­ing some­one for their trou­bles, and we end up blam­ing the oth­er side for al­low­ing or caus­ing such mur­der to take place. Again I ask, what­ev­er hap­pened to good old fash­ioned horse sense?

It isn’t just about guns and mass shoot­ings ei­ther. The folks in Con­gress all do the, “it ain’t me” dance over any­thing and every­thing. But those folks in Wash­ington are do­ing the same thing we all do every ­day. If we have an ac­ci­dent, we blame the oth­er dri­ver. If our kids fail a class in school, we blame the teacher. If we wake up at eight in the morn­ing on a Sat­ur­day, you know we’re go­ing to blame some­one for get­ting their grass cut at such an un­god­ly hour. We pig out on Big Macs and Coke and blame Mickey Dee’s for sell­ing junk food. We as a so­ci­ety are en­am­ored with blame. We lav­ish it on any­one and every­one we come in con­tact with.

Con­sid­er this. When the Or­ange Pump­kin was the leader of the free world we blamed him for his crass treat­ment of oth­er world lead­ers and his even crass­er treat­ment of peo­ple he didn’t much care for. He blamed the press for re­port­ing what they think they saw him do­ing, and they blamed him for ques­tion­ing their motives. Ei­ther that or they blamed oth­er peo­ple in the press for not see­ing things the way the Don of Mar Lago saw things. These days we’re blam­ing Joe for every­thing from the women of Af­ghan­istan hav­ing to wear burkas again, to leav­ing that hole in the world we tried to fill with mon­ey, to not hav­ing for­mu­la on the shelves, to in­flation, to sup­ply chain dif­fi­cul­ties.

But can we call peo­ple who say the last elec­tion was stolen, liars? Oh my goodness no. We have to be fair and po­lit­i­cal­ly cor­rect. That elec­tion wasn’t stolen and there are some folks who are prob­a­bly go­ing to end up in jail, so the U.S. gov­ernment can make that point. But you know we will all gripe and moan that our guy either is or is not get­ting what he de­serves and that it’s all Joe’s fault. We are a stu­pid lot of folks, aren’t we?

We near­ly refuse to ever take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for our own ac­tions. We all have to find some­one to blame for why we just had no choice but to be stu­pid. I’ve spent some time in my life con­sid­er­ing why we act so fool­ish­ly. I don’t think it’s be­cause we’re dumb. I think it’s be­cause we are all try­ing to be good as op­posed to bad, or right as op­posed to wrong or le­gal as op­posed to il­le­gal. We de­rive right­eousness from say­ing that those Mex­i­cans cross­ing the bor­der would be like Je­sus, just alright with me, if they only crossed legal­ly. But we refuse to make it pos­si­ble for them to cross legal­ly. The oth­er side is to blame or wants to re­place the other side. Cripes, but we are a stu­pid lot of peo­ple, aren’t we?

Here’s the good news. We are free to be as stu­pid or as smart as we want to be. We can blame Joe for prices at the pump, but we all know that he has lit­tle or noth­ing to do with those prices. We all think that Vlad is a mon­ster and that he deserves to lose his yachts and the ru­ble should be worth less than Mo­nopoly mon­ey. We can all get be­hind killing them Russ­ian kids in uni­form, but for the love of God, we have to pro­tect the un­born. I mean, we shouldn’t even wear con­doms for fear of keep­ing a baby from be­ing born. But who cares if that baby grows up to com­mit sui­cide? And by the way, we don’t want to send mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine, right? That might cost us car­ing about some­one oth­er than the col­lec­tive “Me”.

Come on folks; we’re bet­ter than all of this horse ma­nure. We all know bet­ter than to try to live in a fan­ta­sy world. We know the dif­fer­ence be­tween peo­ple who are look­ing to use the gov­ern­ment for per­son­al fame and peo­ple who use the govern­ment to do things for “We The Peo­ple”. So how about we make com­mon sense a litmus test for our politi­cos? What if we demand that be­fore we vote for a who, we want to see how that par­tic­u­lar who proves what they’re claim­ing to know or to be able to do? If they can not or will not talk sense then all we need to do is walk away. The press should be do­ing that for us, I sus­pect, but peo­ple in the press are hu­man too and they some­times get squea­mish about find­ing out what politi­cians are up to. They can act like they’re try­ing to make friends, not find out what peo­ple are trying to ac­com­plish. But isn’t that why we all have minds of our own? Don’t we have our own minds to use them? I don’t know about you but I don’t want some ya­hoo in Wash­ing­ton de­cid­ing what I should think or do. Do you?

References

1. Gramlich, J. (2022, February 3). Gun deaths in the US: 10 key questions answered. Pew Research Center. Retrieved May 22, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/