On the extreme end of blame are the conspiracy theorists,
marching, lock-step, with the racist element.
I have a former friend whom I feel falls into, if not both
categories, the classification as a conspiracy buff. His claim is that the Chinese are
strategizing to take over the free world.
His basis in fact? Actually, his
basis in fact is fact only in his own thoughts.
The theory began to take hold of him when he lost his job to an Asian
person. Then he lost another. And another.
Not once did he self-evaluate, and say, “Maybe there is something that I
am doing wrong.” Instead, the easy way
was to blame the Asian community for stealing his job.
Next was his recognition that there were thousands of
Chinese students in our universities, taking, according to him, spots away from
Canadians. He ignored the reality that
no Canadian was turned down as a consequence of a foreign student buying his
way into that spot. Like my friend’s
jobs, the seats were filled with students who had the dedication to advance
their education.
My friend then chose to add to his arsenal of “proof” that
the Chinese were sending only the brightest to “his” country, and that they
were acting as an advance guard, who would use their higher learning to take
over. Again, he dismisses the idea that
individual families were screened carefully by Canadian authorities, who decided
which students obtained visas. To assume
that these were “spies” bordered on ridiculous, but conspiracy theorists tend
to ignore realities in favour of biases.
It is easier to blame others than look at uncomfortable truths.
My old buddy goes on to claim that the tens of thousands of economic
immigrants that arrive each year actually are sent by the Chinese government,
as well, to take over our economy.
Perhaps, a small bit of truth.
The investment by foreign interests in our country is huge. But we make the choice to accept the inputs,
so it is difficult to blame the Chinese authorities for our decisions. Still, hundreds of thousands do ignore fact,
and blame the Chinese.
My brother, like my friend, lost his job to an Asian
worker. The fact that the Asian worker
was a much better employee than my brother does not stop my kin from claiming
that the Filipino community is plotting to take our jobs. He trumps that claim by stating that his
former employer, a Jewish person, is part of a global Jewish plot. I suppose that the Filipinos are now a part
of that sinister program? What my
brother ignores is that we are part Jewish!
Does that make him part of the conspiracy? He rationalized that fact away, briefly, by
denying his origins. That is, until my
research proved otherwise, and then he claimed that there might be some Jewish
people who were not part of the universal plot.
These two anecdotes seem a far reach from discussions of
lifestyle changes and blame, but they are not.
How many millions of us have tried, dozens of times, to
implement a diet, but failed? How many
have made New Years resolutions, but lacked the commitment to see them through
beyond January? And, in turn, how many
of us have said, “That diet doesn’t work.”
Diets neither work nor fail.
The work is in the hands of the dieter.
We simply choose to deflect the blame, and decline to accept personal
responsibility.
This deflection occurs regularly. “The government should do this,” or “that
accident occurred because the city didn’t clear the roadway,” and so on. The truth?
We are the government, so we make choices, and the government that we
have is the one that we allowed to be put in place. The accident occurs, always, because someone
fails to exercise proper caution, given the conditions in which he or she was
driving.
We cry about high crime rates, yet expect others to take
measures to prevent crime. We cry about
high fuel prices, then drive up those prices by driving big vehicles, using
excess amounts of petroleum-based products and invest in oil companies so that
we can benefit from the soaring stock prices.
We blame the rich for getting rich, then aggressively seek to get rich
ourselves.
In an old (1960s) study, jurists in a British shoplifting
case found a young man guilty of stealing a few pounds worth of goods,
sentenced him to a hefty sentence, and then took the afternoon to discuss,
among themselves, how to inflate their expense claims for the trial! The Kitty Genovese incident of the 1960s is
one of thousands where people have chosen to not come to the aid of someone in
urgent need, opting to expect others to step forward instead.
Personal accountability is difficult. Accepting responsibility for our actions
takes effort, and often can cost us.
Yet, the failure to accept the personal onus for ethical action costs us
much more, in internal esteem.
When we do the difficult, and make moral, ethical choices
regardless of the cost, the ease with which we live with ourselves becomes
greater, while the more frequently we choose the easy, less ethical response,
the more anguish and angst we face inside.
The best diet, the hardest to adhere to, is not one that
involves actual food. It is the one that
weans us off attributing blame to others, and leads us into accepting
responsibility for who we are, who we want to be, and how we want the world
around us to evolve. Stop blaming the
diet! Be the ethical dieter. It is not
the diet that doesn’t work: it is that people fail to implement the diet.
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