mea culpa

The poor will lend it to their need; the rich, and the gluttons eternally find rest for it on the bountiful shoulders of excess. The less intelligent and the presumably naive find their scapegoat in their ignorance. People, on the whole, will lean against whatever intangible and completely unanswerable object they can for their impunity. When indicted for our crimes, trespasses, and the personal slaughters of our own hopes we can nearly always find some empty nook in the giant edifice of the unblameable in which to rest our own culpability.

Almost.

But for some more than others, the burdens of our own accountability cannot be surrendered so easily.

If I really thought you needed it, I'd invent a statistic to illustrate the overwhelming number of people who believe in God only for the massive capacity to harbor blame found in an infinite, omnipotent, omniscient diety, but you already know. In the troughs of our personal guilt, we have all found the heady release of being able to blame the Universe or any other all encompassing entity for what we have become. We hurl our anger at the sun, pretending to be disappointed in a clear blue sky that did not reach down with cloud fingers and turn our mouths away from that illicit kiss, put away that last dime spent, or mend that trust broken.

We seek out psychiatrists to hear our side of the story alone. Willfully ignoring the knowledge that in psychology there is very little objectivism, and that with only our sides of the stories, overpaid men in armchairs can condone our blame of everyone but ourselves with generic conviction.

A hundred thousand reasons why we deserve impunity for the hundred million small indescrepancies of our humanity.

Or we are the injured martyrs of the world, who know we cannot give the blame away, like old, broken toys at a garage sale. These masses, upon realizing their inability to flush themselves of the evidence of their faults, often make a childlike collection of it. They line their delinquincies up on shelves, the glass figurines which will illustrate to the world just how uniquely broken they are. They surround themselves with them and become curators of transgression. Reaching into hands so much bigger than their own, pulling down on their heads bigger and bigger castigations than their overburdened hearts can carry. Stealing for themselves remonstrances that perhaps should be reserved for the ethers.

But if we are among those strange souls who find mental pathways past the sentries of our bravado and self-preservation, we ultimately come to the realization that blame is not ours to give, or take. That seeking to control our liabilities and immunities is ineffective, whether we dole them out, or hoard them. We find that there is a great balance, calibrated only by the choices we make in each and every moment.

I don't know what happens then. But I'll let you know