Casting Blame
Urbanna, Va.— When my husband worked the legal department at the Newport News Shipyard, I often heard it said that attaining 95% perfection in a ship was doable, but reaching 100% perfection was nearly impossible.
Nonetheless, we expect perfection… from others, that is. We want others to deliver us perfection even though we know perfectly well that whatever is our line of work chances are we can’t deliver perfection ourselves. No matter how hard we might try.
Human nature also drives us to assign blame whenever anything goes wrong, which always happens at times because there is no perfection in the human world. Of late, blame is being cast like stone for the oil spill off the Gulf. A great tragedy; probably the worst environmental accident caused by man in this nation’s history. But what good does it do to cast blame, especially when the leak is still not stopped?
I suppose we might blame the government regulatory systems that were asleep at the switch. We hear suggestions that oil companies and government regulators were too close, too friendly, with too much oil money feeding political campaigns. Certainly President Obama must take blame who is, after all, the ultimate person responsible for what goes wrong on his watch. (We would also blame President Bush if we could, who arguably received more blame for things gone wrong in his administration than any other president in U.S. history, but he has retired from office.)
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| by Mary Wakefield Buxton |
So are we, the people, to blame. Anyone who has an automobile and who fills his tank at the gas station is to blame for the accident because without our insatiable demand for its product, BP would not be in the Gulf drilling for oil in the first place.
How quaint that we fill our tanks with gasoline and then look for someone to blame for the oil spill… as if the two events aren’t somehow connected. As if everyone else in the world is ever at fault, but never Mr. and Mrs. Gas Guzzler.
Isn’t it amazing how good we are at rationalizing life so that someone else is to blame for what goes wrong, but never ourselves? The human brain is tops at myopic thinking. We are as horses walking along with blinders attached to our eyes that prevent us from seeing a bigger picture of the world.
“To err is human.” Alas, no matter how much we crave perfection there is none of it in all the face of humanity. Oil rigs leak, soldiers shoot innocent victims, policemen make wrongful arrests, judges send innocent people to jail, and so on. Even columnists will misspell words, make grammatical errors, and deliver wrong opinions.
Still, unless we agree to return to a more primitive lifestyle, present-day society needs oil. So it seems we must take risks. However, we appear to be dividing rather rapidly into two separate camps: Producers, who take big risks to provide us our needs, and Receivers, who get the benefits of such things as new inventions, manufactured goods, miracle life-prolonging drugs, advances in surgery, energy resources and much, much more.
Of late, Receivers seem to sit back and enjoy the hard efforts of risk- taking Producers, but let something go wrong and such troops are quick to criticize, cast judgment, assign blame, and even initiate lawsuits for damages, which they have every right to do. But somehow it doesn’t seem fair. If one demands products of risk-taking Producers, then it seems to me that one ought to accept some responsibility when things go awry.
When the dust settles, the BP oil spill may well become the premiere national tragedy of all time. It has caused 11 deaths and untold damages to the environment that will cost perhaps trillions of dollars to clean up—a cost that will eventually hit consumers. But as long as we use oil, and drill for oil, we will have leaks. Accident rates can be lessened, and we might attain 95% perfection, but we will never stop all accidents.
To those who must cast blame, the world eagerly awaits your contributions. At the very least, could you kindly offer less demand for oil? Trade in your car and walk. Or get a horse. (But, please, leave no pollution on the streets.)
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