The Blame Game

The tragedy of the recent shooting in Arizona, has already sparked the usual "Blame Game" scenario. Our society has fallen into a mentality where opposing sides of any ideology, political or otherwise, use any given tragedy as an excuse to vilify one another. Even the random act of an obviously mentally disturbed individual is an excuse for this type of capitalization.

The recent Arizona tragedy, which critically injured a well liked and respected Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, and resulted in the deaths of 6 others, one of which is an innocent 9 yr. old child, and also the Chief Federal Judge of Arizona John Roll, is the current trigger for sparking the blame game.

The shooter, 22 yr. old Jared Loughner, is an obviously disturbed young man who has been losing his grip on reality, since high school. This is indicated by seeing his recent you-tube videos, which he produced, that are incoherent and bizarre and obviously delusional. Also, recent intervies with Loughner's high school classmates, reveal a disturbing pattern which obviously escalated into a complete break with reality.

The blame game started, within the first 15 mins. after the shooting. The blame gamers have taken aim at the Tea Party to Sarah Palin and it continues, unabated in major media, as we write this blog. Even our own Senator Dick Durbin has weighed in on the blame game.

The medical profession itself still does not have all the answers to the riddles of disturbed pathology. So how can someone like Sherriff Clarence Dupnik, a chief investigating officer in the case, presume to know what the medical profession itself does not? He summed up his diagnosis with these words: "I think the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business and what we see on TV and how our youngsters are being raised, shows that this has not become the nice United States of America that most of us grew up in." Really? Perhaps the Sherriff forgot the Cole Younger gang of the 1800's, the machine-gun shoot outs of the Mafia in the 1920's, Bonnie & Clyde of the 1930's, and the more recent John Wayne Gacey, to name a few. Has he forgotten the innocent college students who were gunned down on a Ohio college campus in the early 1970's? Is that the nice America he is speaking about?

The act of one loony tune, seems to bring all the other loonies out of the closet. The reasoning, that you can understand the reasoning of a mad man is truly mad. Believing that you can play the blame game because of the mad act of a mad individual is even more mad. Will the real crazy person please stand up. Don't all stand at once.

If one wants to play the blame game, who is really responsible for the care of the mentally ill, and the protection of society from these unfortunate individuals; and how does one implement that control and protection? Can we really be expected to catch every disturbed mind before it reels out of control? Is every single tragedy within our power to predict and prevent? Hurricane Katrina, and act of nature, also sparked the blame game. Now, another act of a mentally disturbed individual, who had apparently been walking about out there like a ticking time bomb, has also created the idea, that we are somehow divinely in control of everything in life, from acts of nature, to the acts of mad men. Certainly we must do all within our power to prevent and mitigate tragedies like this from occurring, to the best of our abilities. But to think that we will always be able to do so, is another form of madness. Even worse, is to think that we can find someone to blame every time an act of nature, or an out of control madman strikes, is beyond mad.