Who Is to Blame?
I am to blame. Society is fractured and it’s my fault. I chipped away at civility one encounter at a time, pointing a finger toward everyone else as I accused society of being meaner than it used to be. Gazing out my window and across my lawn, it occurred to me one day that society did not stop at my property line. I am part of the society to which I refer to as broken and unkind.
The year was 2020, and I had returned to the sanctuary of my home from a trip to the grocery store which meant dealing with thoughtless, rude people clogging up the aisles, and sharing the road with careless, indignant drivers. Impatient shoppers pushing me aside to get what they wanted was bad enough in a normal year. The violation of my personal space took on a whole new meaning at the beginning of the pandemic. Knowing how a regular upper respiratory illness tends to hit my lungs, I was a little anxious about inclusion in a statistic of which I wanted no part.
Returning to the safety of home, I closed the door to the world and breathed a sigh of relief. Washing the danger of illness off my hands, I looked up at the woman in the bathroom mirror and came face to face with the problem. I had become a meaner person than I used to be. The kind young woman who left the nest decades ago wearing a smile she meant was buried inside an embittered woman peering out of jaded eyes.
How can one average person like me be to blame for the degradation of humanity’s civility? The answer is lying right there in the question: Because I am average. I am not one; I am one of many.
I am a drop in an ocean of people massive enough to effect change without realizing we have done so. I did not wound civility in an instant, and I did not wound it alone. Sure, we like to blame the ones in the spotlight. Politicians make it easy to lay all the blame on them. They are not without blame, but the average people have the numbers. Compared to our ocean of average people, politicians are nothing more than a single martini glass filled with self-serving lawyers and garnished with a narcissistic businessman who keeps stirring up the mix.
Humanity has not been injured just by politicians. It’s been injured by the masses. Picture a bell curve. There are a small number of extraordinarily good people on the right side (Mother Teresa, my grandmother-in-law Hazel, etc.) and a small number of unthinkably bad people on the left side (Hitler, Charles Manson, etc.). Most of us reside in the large area in the middle, in the land of average. Together we ordinary people have the power of numbers to turn the clock back to civility one encounter at a time.
Since that day in 2020, I’ve been in search of my lost benevolence. It took a while, but I found it on the front porches and neighborhood streets of the hometown that raised me. I found it in grade school classrooms and under the shade of a tree on a playground. You can read about my discovery in Walking Old Roads, set for the bookshelves sometime in mid to late 2023. In the meantime, I’m trying a little each day to be a kinder version of myself and extend my definition of home beyond the boundaries of my property line.
I don’t want to play the blame game anymore. How about you?
Originally published on BizCatalyst360.
