.authored by something.of.substance.
.pass the buck.
This just in: an airplane crashed; something went wrong. In the latest example of this all too familiar scenario, Continental Connection Flight 3407 crashed into a Buffalo, NY house killing fifty people. Almost as soon as the iced over plane went down, the news began relentlessly reporting every tragically inane detail. The de-icing system was activated. No birds were involved. The plan nose-dived- wait- flat-bellied into a house. And, the latest announcement, the plane was flying on autopilot which was, in such weather conditions, against some airline policies. Depending on the situation. What started out as an un-biased accounting of a tragedy soon turned into a blame game. Someone needed to be responsible. Someone needed to be at fault. This person, speculatively, is the pilot. I think he learned his lesson.
While it helps future pilots to learn from the mistakes made, leaping to the “blame” doesn’t do anything to bring back the victims of the crash. The thing that people seem to forget in the whirlwind of media updates is that the pilots (and rest of the crew) are also victims of the crash. We don’t want to hear that. Our society has a long history of victim-blaming, of putting the victim on trial- usually in the court of public perception. We blame women who are sexually assaulted for “wearing suggestive clothing” or “being outside after dark” or even “enjoying themselves too much.” We call the impoverished “lazy” and “incompetent”. We file lawsuits against medical personnel whenever a loved one dies, even if we knew there was only a slim chance of their survival. We blame the mentally ill for the combination of genetics and environment that produced their mental illness. When relationships end, we blame the other person for ruining them. In short, we blame. We insist upon finding fault without ever being at fault.
Even when a tragedy can and does have a clear villain, we forget that in some ways they are victims themselves. The Columbine killers have families that not only lost their children, however horrendous their actions, but they will have to live name demonized and used synonymously with disgust Understanding that killers (deliberate or accidental) are victims too does not diminish their crime nor their guilt. It does nothing to change the outcome of the events for those involved. But, it does to something to us as a society to dehumanize those whom commit these acts. Acknowledging that someone who takes human lives is also human falls into that moral gray area most of us aren’t comfortable being in or around. Writing people off as “unfixable” or “monstrous” doesn’t give us a chance to truly reconcile what has happened nor does it allow us to confront it at work in society. To say that school killers are soulless or that pilots of downed planes incompetent never aides in solving the problem of school killings or plane crashes.
What the story of Continental Connection Flight 3407 needs now is not a healthy dose of finger-pointing and rubber-necking. It is terribly unfortunate that those people lost their lives and horrendous to think it may have come about because of human error. The families of the victims, all of the victims, will not move on by blaming and neither will we. It was Alexander Pope who once said: “To err is human; to forgive is divine”. For a society as spiritual and giving as ours claims to be, we should know how to focus on forgiveness and how to celebrate humanity.
