So often conversations are a litany of grievances aimed at the obvious problems of our world in which the blame is then put on the speaker’s favorite villain. Topping the list is usually the greedy rich people, then corporations, perhaps another social group, or some other party’s politicians, occasionally a person will blame themselves … I googled “blame list” but didn’t find a generalized list like I started above. There are many synonyms like hold responsible, accuse, denounce, indict, impeach, incriminate, impute, recriminate, but that’s not a list of people or groups or natural events that we can blame. Blame needs to be concrete! Preferably it’s people who are to blame.
Blame it on the weather is often the excuse on the TV weather channel, but that always seems a weak excuse because natural things like the weather always have some degree of predictability. Even if you are in a tornado zone like the American Midwest, it makes sense to have a tornado cellar, and if you don’t then you are exposed to injury. Who is to blame? The natural phenomenon like the weather, or the human who didn’t have enough forethought to prepare for an occasional weather event?
thefreedictionary.com gave as its first definition for blame “To consider responsible for a misdeed, failure, or undesirable outcome,” and I guess that would always be attached to a given problem that has arisen in a specific situation. But in the tornado situation above, the blame could be placed on someone who wasted their money building a storm shelter when there isn’t a tornado and their children haven’t been cared for because of money shortage and are stunted. Who’s to blame?
Perhaps we must take the Stoic perspective and simply accept the things we can’t control and do what we can to control the things we can control.
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