Stop Playing the Blame Game

I’ve realized over the last few weeks that I’ve secretly become an angry person – not in a physical sense – but in terms of my emotional state of mind. By nature, I have an optimistic attitude, I believe in people’s basic “goodness,” and I assume that their intentions are honorable by default. This is not out of na?veté (I have plenty of life experience to protect against that), but out of a hopeful view of what is possible. Yet each morning I wake up to new evidence that the world has been turned on its head and taken over by people who fundamentally don’t care about doing what is right…or whose sense of “right” is on the fringe of societal norms. I suppose some examples would help:

• The Catholic Church: As a practicing Catholic, the sexual abuse scandal in the church is beyond my comprehension. The fact that the abuse occurred over so many years and across so many communities is shocking enough. Then the institutional leaders of the church compounded the tragedy by trying to “protect the church” (and themselves) with a heinous series of cover-ups.  This started with the disclosures in Boston…and it just doesn’t seem to have an end. There is no part of any faith that could contemplate this type of behavior. And the concept of forgiveness, which is a pillar of the Catholic faith, is difficult to embrace either. When I pray, I just don’t know where to go with this…
• Elon Musk and Tesla: I come from the tech world, so I understand the idea that there are leaders who have a visionary impact on products, markets, and services. Elon Musk is likely one of those people. But that hardly gives him the right to belittle those that are funding his company by calling their questions “boring” and “bonehead.” Nor does it give him the right to manipulate the stock market using Twitter and an imaginary financing deal. People in the valley and in the tech community excuse the behavior as eccentric – and that is inexcusable to me.

• Brett Kavanaugh: Regardless of your political leanings or social viewpoints, the Kavanaugh hearings were a travesty on all sides. Republicans started by delaying action on Obama’s last nominee, Merrick Garland, for over nine months until the presidential election had passed. In the latest nomination process, they pursued a scorched earth strategy to get Kavanaugh’s nomination approved, deciding that due process and fair and complete investigations just didn’t matter. Democrats were only slightly better behaved, choosing to hold evidence and issues until the last moment in the hope that the whole process would get delayed beyond the mid-term election. And Kavanaugh’s angry and disrespectful final testimony was simply unfitting for any judicial candidate, much less a supreme court nominee.
• Environment: As our forests and communities burn and hurricanes and floods lambast our shores in increasing numbers, how do we account for the naysayers who believe everything is “fine?” The EPA is steadily taking steps to backtrack from even the most basic regulations to protect the environment, and leaders prefer to blame others rather than accepting that we are damaging our own planet in ways that are not easy to reverse. The shortsightedness is shocking as is the price our children and their children will pay.
• Elections: Leaving aside who “won” and who “lost,” this election cycle featured an ever-present sense of finger pointing and negative messaging. More importantly, the volume of the negativity was higher than ever, as money poured in from all sides and angles to affect the outcome. To be complete, let’s add in gerrymandering and leaders supporting rules to restrict the right to vote. The challenge for citizens is sorting through the dirt and the muck to understand the real character of the candidates – and our process seems designed to make that as difficult as possible. That, at a time when voting is more important than ever.

While processing all this anger and negativity, I’ve reached the conclusion that I’m part of the problem. Sorting through all the gunk and clutter requires great energy, and I’ve allowed that to drain the optimism right out of my life, and that is just unacceptable. So as I approach the new year and think about “what can be different” in 2019, I’m thinking about a few changes in attitude:

1.    Less Viewing, More Listening: Social media and the screens we use to consume content have shifted our focus away from the very human act of talking to someone and listening to their point of view. Incivility and anger are easier when we isolate ourselves from the reality of personal interaction.

2.    Less Whining, More Action: It is far too easy to fall into the pity pit and assume there is nothing we can do about the challenges that seem to engulf our communities. I was cheered to see voters come out in record numbers for the mid-term elections and hope that trend continues. The reality is that change requires action from all of us – individually and collectively – and saying that one person can’t have an impact is a cop out.

3.    Less Me, More Us: Tackling the difficult issues we face requires collective action – working together across interest groups, party lines, ideological boundaries, and other barriers. Working this way means we can’t all optimize for our personal needs. We must make tradeoffs and decisions that sometimes mean “less for me.”

4.    Less Yelling, More Debate: Part of the anger we feel is about the tone of the discussions. There is a huge difference between angrily pointing fingers and constructive debate, and we’ve lost the art of having honest but respectful conversations. Finding productive solutions ultimately requires some tradeoffs and compromises, but the only way to make those decisions is to understand the options clearly and rationally, through informed, passionate debate.

5.    Less Politics, More Leadership: Are Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy, and Donald Trump going to lead us effectively to a better place? They are all master politicians with a history of poor leadership. The time has come for us to demand that elected officials focus on what is best for our communities and country rather than for some shifting sense of party allegiance, philosophy, or personal advancement.

Being angry is only useful if it generates positive, constructive action. That means we must stop playing the blame game and take personal accountability for what is going on in our communities and across the country.

We must be informed, active voters.

We must lobby and protest for change.

We must demand corporate responsibility.

We must fight for the next generation.

These are not simple things. They require personal sacrifice and tradeoffs with other activities that we might enjoy more. But they are the essential elements of a functioning democracy. We only have our talents, our time, and our treasure to allocate amongst a variety of competing interests. Today, collectively, we are not allocating enough of those scarce resources to the things that matter in the long term. If we can stop blaming others and recognize that we can make a difference – real, constructive change can happen – and it can happen quickly. We saw the first glimpses of this civic reawakening in the recent elections. Now the challenge is to ensure that commitment continues, and indeed rises to a whole new level. Game on.