Americans generally don’t want to take responsibility for their choices, or, for that matter, for their very character as a nation.
When children don’t pay attention at school, you don’t say they lack discipline or that the teachers are boring, or that the syllabi are uninspired and uninspiring; you say that they have ADHD. Now I’m sure some might have ADHD, but to my perception, nothing has ever been as over (and lazily) diagnosed as ADHD.
The LGBT movement is not much better when it comes to this, with everybody (this is a US thing, I assure you) going way out of their way to insist and ‘prove’ that people are necessarily born with their sexual preferences and identities and that these (go figure) have little or nothing to do with their (inarguably genetic) physical bodies. It strikes me as a very poor approach because, inherently, it’s as if they’re saying that if homosexuality (for example) were a choice, then it would be okay to ‘blame’ homosexuals. Can people not see how disempowering that argument is? It inherently implies that your choice of sexual preference or identity is up for public debate when that should never, ever, be the case. This attitude prevails in the US but is seldom encountered in Europe or Asia.
When, as has become a regular occurrence, some jackass goes into a school or a mall and murders a whole bunch of people, American media inevitably refers to the ‘lone wolf’, the ‘mad dog’, as though this were an individual aberration and not a cultural one, despite the rarity of such events outside the USA and their frequency inside it. The exception, of course, is when the perpetrator is of Arab origin, then, of course, it’s simpler, and they just call it ‘terrorism’, and allude to dark forces in foreign counties and wars that must be fought thousands of miles away from US borders. When such murders take place in Asia (rarely), the culture is far more prone to examine the context in which such an act occurs; the school, the mainstream culture, the society around the perpetrator, looking for some symptoms of what they recognize must be a socially induced ailment or dis-ease. A fascinating book that goes into this particular issue is ‘The Geography of Thought’, which I highly recommend.
A while ago, while I was in the US, a woman had (again, this is happening far more frequently than one would expect) forgotten her infant in a car. In a news segment, they presented an (may I find it in my heart to forgive myself for using his word in reference to this individual) ‘expert’, and he started talking about ‘Forgotten Baby Syndrome‘.
Even politically, now that Trump has won, Americans, rather than, as we hoped, face themselves, and the monstrosity they have (collectively) become, choose to believe that somebody else was responsible for his victory. That there’s no way that things in the US are so bad that somebody like Trump could have been fairly elected. That something must’ve intervened with the great and noble will of gracious, kind, progressive, freedom-loving Americans. That, in short, the Russians did it!
Nothing is ever your fault. Is it America?
