The Blame Game
"All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won't succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy." -Wayne Dyer
I've noticed an annoying and disturbing trend lately.
Staying informed about the world isn't as easy as it used to be. You'd think it would be even easier because there are so many channels, so many newspapers,. . . but it seems like celebrity rehab and petty political infighting is all that's going on in the world (well, now we've got a few real estate issues and maybe a tiny bit of an economic problem). I know that there is news going on in the world and the information is out there, somewhere, but I am having a heck of a time finding it.
The trend I find so disturbing is that 'news caster' (really a misnomer, should be called 'infotainers') are playing a little thing called 'the blame game'.
The frame that the newscasters are laying out is this: when learning of or reporting a problem, instead of getting to the core, they go to the question, 'Whose fault is it that we're in this situation? Who is to blame? We need to know who to blame.' Ostensibly, they want to figure out who to blame to 'punish' them (or simply interview them).
My guess is that in our era of 24 hour news on a multitude of stations, instead of actually reporting what might be happening in the world, they stretch the inane blathering of the hybrid newscasters/talk show hosts/cultural critics/morons. The non-stop static of their voices is sort of like adding bread crumbs to ground beef to make a meat loaf... It makes the meat seem more substantial.
At this point, the news is mostly breadcrumbs. And they're stale. And the meat might be tainted. And I'm full. And I'm a vegetarian anyway.
I'm an equal opportunity critic/cynic where this is concerned. With the exception of Jon Stewart (where more information is 'leaked' out in twenty-three minutes than in all the other stations combined over a twenty four hour period), I'm sick of all of these guys.
So why is it that we are so hell bent on assigning blame all the time? When are we going to get to the point of assigning solutions? It's not 'who's to blame', but how can we get ourselves out of these messes and help turn lives around? Why can't that be our collective priority?
Unfortunately, the ratings are better for bad news. The ratings are better for humiliation. The ratings are better hunting down predators. The ratings are better in taunting the bad guys but not in actually catching the bad guy and bringing him to justice (er. .. Osama.) Whose fault is this? Who's to blame here? Well. .. my point exactly. Of course I'm showing the silliness of this by blaming others for blaming.