Over these years, I’ve seen a few changes, even prompted one or two of them. Blame is kind of like manure on a dairy farm: there’s never any shortage of it but it’s hard to find anyone who seems excited about the inherent opportunities.

I’ve found that I can spend an awful lot of time griping about the cows and wishing someone else would do something about them but at the end of the day there’s just a certain amount of by-product that results from turning alfalfa into cream. It’s pretty much inevitable.

There’s a similar inevitability in our own workings. We will make mistakes. We will forget details, including some large enough to smack us in the face. We will misunderstand. We will misinterpret. We will accuse and be wrong. We will be accused and someone else will be right. So will all of the people we know.

In most of those cases, blame is a relatively useless exercise in meanness or insecurity. Responsibility, on the other hand, is a different story. Now there’s a shovel that will fit every hand!

H. Arnett
11/6/09