Blame is the Name of the Game

(The following several posts are an article I wrote up last year, that I then broke into 4 parts to be published in the local newspaper.  This is part one)

            Late on June 14, 2016, a two-year-old boy from Nebraska vacationing in Florida with his family was tragically killed by an alligator.  The boy, Lane Graves, was walking along the edge of the water near a resort when the alligator snatched him away and drowned him.  His father, standing nearby, tried to rescue Lane from the alligator, but he was unsuccessful. 

            On May 28, 2016, a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo named Harambe was shot and killed by zoo employees.  A four-year-old boy had managed to enter the gorilla enclosure and was being carried around by the gorilla.  The zoo employees assessed the situation and considered it a life threatening situation for the young boy.  After determining that tranquilizer drugs would not act quickly enough to put an end to the danger, the officials made the decision to kill the gorilla.  The boy escaped with injuries, but none which threatened his life. 

            Both of these situations are tragic.  In one case, a family lost a beloved son.  In another case, another family nearly suffered the same fate, and an animal beloved by many lost his life.  This article does not aim to assess the situations, though.  Rather, it is the responses that the public has had to these two tragedies that draw my present interest.

            In both cases, legions flocked to Twitter so that they could cast blame.  The mother of the four-year-old was blamed for being neglectful, for failing to restrain her child, for being the cause of the death of the gorilla.  The workers of the zoo were blamed for shooting the gorilla, for not using non-lethal means to neutralize the threat, in some cases, for choosing the boy over the gorilla.  The parents of the two-year-old boy who was killed by the alligator were blamed for allowing their child in alligator infested waters.  They were cast as neglectful parents because the boy was harmed in this way.  Some blamed them for allowing the boy to walk in waters marked “No Swimming.”  Others blamed the resort for only marking the waters “No Swimming,” rather than “HEY PEOPLE, THERE ARE BIG HUMAN EATING ALLIGATORS HERE!” 

            This reflects a prevalent attitude within our culture.  When some undesirable thing happens, we are prone to cast blame.  On June 12, a gunman entered an Orlando night club and killed 49 people.  The fact that this man was a Muslim and the nightclub catered to homosexual clientele has led to no shortage of blame being cast, whether that blame is cast upon Muslims, Christians, or the shooter himself.    Blame was cast in any and every direction.

            I am not trying to make the point that we cannot examine situations and assess ways that things have gone wrong or are broken.  Perhaps the gorilla enclosure needed to be more secure.  Maybe the shore could have been better marked or fenced off.  Certainly, we can evaluate that the gunman in Orlando was wrong in taking those 49 lives. 

            What I am arguing is that our modern society is not just prone to casting blame.  When bad things happen, our culture MUST cast blame.  If we do not, then we have to confront a far more dreadful and scary proposition.