One of the things that makes it incredibly hard to find things to want to blog about lately is that there’s so much wrong which is systemic, I don’t even know where to start. But one thing that stands out for me today is that there must, always, be someone to blame.
Not something to blame. Some one. Some person, or identifiable people must be blamed, and punished, however tenuous their connection to the harm.
And the consequence is that we’ve gone from the land of the free, home of the brave, to the land of perpetual expansion of control and imprisonment and the home of the scared shitless.
Everyone must be on constant lockdown.
Thirst for Punishment
My friend, Scott, whose blog I read regularly, has had several posts lately that can only be characterized as, “we have to find someone to blame.”
It’s not SCOTT saying that. He’s just pointing out something that, as I see it, is a new trend. Something terrible has happened. And someone must be held accountable in a way that will slake our thirst for punishment.
After school shootings, of late, it’s no longer acceptable to go after the shooter. Sometimes, they’re dead, too. So there’s no way to punish them.
The Uvalde School Shooting
That was the case for the shooter in the Uvalde school shooting. The shooter was dead. He was beyond vengeance. Not so the officers who responded.
Most of the anger appeared to be over the fact that only the shooter died.
“How do you go to bed at night and then wake up every day? Shame on you all.,” she said. “You said they did it in good faith? You call that good faith? They stood there for 77 minutes and waited after they got call after call that kids were still alive in there. All this is it’s a pact. It’s a brothers’ pact. You protect your own.”
— David K. Li and Doha Madani, “Residents lash out at Uvalde city leaders, police after report on Robb Elementary shooting” (March 7, 2024)
The report after the independent investigation commended one of the officers for keeping a cool head, despite having one of his own children in the school. The gunman shot another officer—one of the first to arrive. Police then finally killed the gunman after they entered a classroom while under constant fire. A parent complained,
“I work in the oil fields; if I don’t do my job, I get fired, plain and simple. I signed up for a dangerous job, I know it’s a dangerous job, and that’s my job. I got to take care of my job. These police officers signed up to do a job. They didn’t do it.”
— David K. Li and Doha Madani, “Residents lash out at Uvalde city leaders, police after report on Robb Elementary shooting” (March 7, 2024)
The officers did do their jobs, for once. The fact that they didn’t charge in immediately and lose some officers is apparently the part that really galls the parents. After all, if the gunman killed the officers, their children would still be alive!
We need someone to blame.
The Sins of the Children
I’ve written about the “sins of the father” visited “unto the third and fourth generations” in a post about “The Tracks We Leave.” The idea comes from Deuteronomy 5:9-10, which talks about an all-loving god who punishes people for not telling him that he’s the greatest. And then he punishes their children, too, for good measure.
Our “christian” nation wants to take this a step farther by punishing parents for the sins of their children. Because when a child “sins,” punishing the child brings insufficient satiety to our need for vengeance.
Scott mentioned this in a recent blog post.
[C]onvicting a child for being a murderous child has proven insufficient to satisfy the public desire for retribution. After all, the child is still a child, likely to make terrible choices, including one to bring a gun to school and use it. No, someone more readily hateable is needed, even though the parent pulled no trigger and harmed no one.
— Scott Greenfield, “Will Charging Parents Be The New Normal?” (September 7, 2024)
Scott notes, when authorities charged the Crumbleys after their son shot and killed at a school, they told us this was an unusual case.
Until the next school shooting that made headlines.
Colt Gray’s father committed no crime himself, but a tragedy occurred and sacrificing a 14-year-old school boy is no longer sufficient to sate the public lust.
— Scott Greenfield, “Will Charging Parents Be The New Normal?” (September 7, 2024)
The Coliseum View of Justice
As Scott rightly points out,
Beyond the fact that there are guns in many homes, it is critical to bear in mind that school shootings are extremely rare despite pervasive fear. What parent would knowingly let his child have a gun if he truly believed he would take it to school and murder his classmates? Contending that a father should have known that his child presented a significant risk of danger is far easier after the fact than before.
— Scott Greenfield, “Will Charging Parents Be The New Normal?” (September 7, 2024)
To imagine that parents like the Crumbleys or the Colts knew, or should have known, that their kids would go shoot up a school and gave them a gun to do it with anyway is moronic. I do not believe there is a single parent in the United States that would do that.
But in the Coliseum View of Justice, every criminal act of injustice requires the satisfaction of our blood lust. We who are not yet accused of our own—or someone else’s—crimes must be sated.
Under that version, there are never enough people to blame. It explains a number of things about our current injustice system, including the presumption of guilt (rather than innocence, which is the “old-fashioned”—deprecated—standard now). Judges routinely deny bail or pretrial release because the Coliseum View of Justice has found someone to satisfy our blood lust. Thus, they must be punished immediately. Take away liberty, family, job….
Nevermind if it’s the right person. I once defended a case where release had been denied for my client, the actual victim of a shooting, because the police met the actual shooters first and accepted their claims that they were the victims. My client sat in jail for about six months, before we were able to show the video at prelim proving he was the victim. But for those six months, the victim was the first “someone to blame” police found, and that’s all the system really wants: someone to blame. Guilt is irrelevant.
When someone murders children for the crime of going to school, lives are destroyed. Hearts fail. Tragedy prevails. But the people to be punished are those who committed the crimes. Not their parents. Not the police.
Blame the Search Engines
When the Crumbleys were first charged for their son’s crimes, I told a colleague that next we’d be going after parents who allowed their children access to other weapons, like butter knives. Scott made this point, too, when he quoted Megan Stack’s article. From Stack:
As a thought exercise, let’s imagine that Colt Gray, instead of smuggling a gun into school, as he is accused of doing, took a butcher knife from his kitchen and stabbed his classmates to death. Would we be prosecuting his father? Of course not, you say. A knife is a normal household item, and there’s no law against leaving one unattended, no matter how it ends up getting used. But a gun, like it or not, is also a normal item in countless American homes. I think giving your minor son a gun should be illegal. But that doesn’t make it so.
The state doesn’t want you to focus on that. Instead, it wants you to get mad at Colin Gray and feel good about his prosecution.
— Megan Stack, “Blaming a Parent, Again, for Failed Gun Laws” (September 6, 2024)
(Stack points out another bizarre aspect of the case: Colt is being charged as an adult. Thus, the law deems him “a mature, fully cognizant individual who can be held to the same legal standard as a grown man.” Would his father be held responsible for the act of any other grown man?)
This is all bad enough. And both Megan Stack and Scott puzzled over the expansion of our need to find someone to blame.
Then I saw Scott’s (older) post that carries the concept even farther. A 1o-year-old girl watched a TikTok video about “the blackout challenge.” She tried it. She died.
Her parents have now sued TikTok on the theory that the TikTok algorithm “suggested” the video. David French put forth the idea that, if a human walked up to the girl at school and suggested she watch the video, we’d hold that person accountable.
I’ve no doubt we would. But there’s a major difference here. Human beings exhibit agency. Humans have the ability to decide between right and wrong. TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t.
TikTok’s algorithm works by analyzing thousands of signals by a user to determine what kind of content they most want to see. These signals — things like likes, comments, follows, and how long they spend on a particular video — determine what videos appear on their ‘For You’ page and in what order.
— Kirsti Lang, “TikTok Algorithm Guide 2024: Everything We Know About How Videos Are Ranked” (March 25, 2024)
Blaming TikTok makes as much sense as blaming browser “cookies” that allow marketers to target you based on websites you’ve visited. What next? Blame Google for the way it suggests “snippets” when you search for something? One wonders what “snippets” Google suggested to Brian Walshe after he killed his wife.
Blaming Individuals for Societal Problems
I’ve complained for some time now that we are too quick to blame individuals for problems caused by the way we collectively structure our society. The news primes us. I firmly believe we, aided by the press, encourage school shooters to shoot up schools.
A child warped and wounded by society wants only relief from his (or her, but I’m not really aware of female school shooters) pain. What does he see? The news doesn’t report about people who find help in constructive ways. Attention and recognition is given to destroyers. Those who strike back at their perceived oppressors.
And who doesn’t fantasize about striking back at those who hurt them? That’s even the driver behind our own desire to find someone to blame beyond blaming the actual perpetrator of our pain, like the school shooters parents, responding officers who don’t charge into a hail of gunfire, or a sophisticated search algorithm developed by TikTok or Google.
We are all naturally wired to blame other people or circumstances when things go wrong. These propensities are partially psychological, driven by something called the fundamental attribution bias. We tend to believe that what people do is a reflection of who they are, rather than considering there may be other factors (social or environmental) influencing their behavior.
— Michael Tims, “Blame Culture Is Toxic. Here’s How to Stop It.” (February 9, 2022)
However, when social or environmental factors influence individual behavior, going after the individuals without addressing the social or environmental factors is all but pointless. Blaming and arresting unhoused people for living in public temporarily ends their homelessness by locking them up. But it doesn’t solve homelessness. Targeting parents because their children targeted a school or cops who did not sufficiently risk their own lives doesn’t address the underlying causes of school shootings. Nor will blaming what is essentially a sophisticated search algorithm for giving people what they want address any of the issues surrounding that want, including their unsupervised ability—when talking about bored children looking for challenges—to get it.
If, in the end, you really cannot resist the urge to find someone to blame—anyone at all—I’d suggest a little time in front of the mirror.
Then ask yourself what you can do about it. Then, as Nike would say, “Just do it.”
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