I’m beginning to believe that there must be some truth in the saying that when one tries to justify their actions as being the will of God, it is simply offloading one’s responsibilities for the choices that you make. For the purists out there, that’s not even taking His name in vain. The key word in the saying is “offloading”. When I was young, I wondered what the sign ‘the buck stops here’ meant, until I asked. Pure and simple, we should stop blaming others for our problems, instead owning up these and actually finding ways to address them. It is part of being personally responsible for which we have control of.
All this stems from one lasting conversation I had with a street vendor in SM (sa Mintal). We were casually talking about anything under the sun; from steadily-rising meat and veggie prices, then street cleaning, up to the impact of the coming Christmas festivities on all these. Then we just happened to talk about what we thought about the current anti-mendicancy ordinance of the city.
She somewhat didn’t know what to say about that one. But somewhere in that topic, she had said it appears others were just simply resigned to the idea that things were meant to be, meaning it was fate and the will of God that they were in that situation. I likewise thought I saw a hint of resentment at ‘the rich’ in general. But more aimed at those who sit in political positions who appear to be anti-poor.
This reminds me I read ‘A country of Our Own’ by Martinez and he had a specific section somewhere about the culture of blame. Yep, common as culture should be. True enough, the number one hallmark of self-defeating behavior is blaming others for life problems. Be it personal, societal or political, people seem to be trigger happy at pointing fingers.
In that sense, it is resorting to playing the victim card, so that in turn, it is also implying you cannot change anything. or worse, you refuse to change anything. on the idea that the will to action is responsibility, there’s a question that remains, how much responsibility is one willing to take for launching into actions we will need to take in order to change things?
