Little kids, especially little boys, often fight with each other. They push, they shove, and when mom or dad comes in to scold them, we almost always hear the proverbial “he/she started it!”
Yeah, kids say the darndest things. But guess what, so do adults. In fact, we have quite a habit of repeating the same things the aforementioned brats say, only we don’t express them with the same exact words.
In a way, we never really grow up, because it’s human nature to blame others for things we may be at least partly to blame.
In this article we’ll delve more into the collective blame, how some nations blame other nations for their problems, but also how individuals blame everyone else for the environmental crisis we are facing.
Like the big little kids that we are, it seems we can’t get over the idea that “he/she/they started it!”
It’s because of them
Now, to be clear, this isn’t to say all claims of blame are unwarranted. Historically, many of the problems nations face can indeed be blamed on others. For example, many experts in international relations know the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was at least part of the reason ISIS became so powerful in the Middle East, and nearly all the calamities Ukraine is facing today can be blamed on the Russian invasion.
But there are many issues both individuals and nations face that, like those bratty kids, can’t always be considered “his fault!”
A common human flaw is to blame the other tribe for nearly every internal problem, or in a more modern case, blaming foreigners for nearly every problem the nation or country faces.
In the U.S., for example, Donald Trump garnered a legion of loyal adherents by unabashedly telling American “patriots” that Mexican and Latino immigrants were the reason American cities were undergoing a surge in crime, even though when Trump was campaigning to be president in 2016, crime rates were at record lows compared to the 1980’s and early 90’s, plus the statistically proven fact that immigrants tend to commit fewer crimes than native born Americans in the US.
Of course, these beliefs aren’t confined to the United States. In Spain it’s common for locals to blame Latinos and gypsies for all their woes, in Japan the blame goes to the Chinese, and in Colombia they blame Venezuelans.
Blame the industry, not me
Here we’ll look beyond tribal rivalries and blame games and move on to individuals vs industries when it comes to the environmental crisis.
Although many continue to deny it, we are facing a major climate crisis which has the potential to lead to global catastrophe in the coming decades, possibly much sooner than that.
Humanity’s biggest party started with the industrial revolution, which led to the first real explosion in the amount of trash we produce. Then came the invention of the first fully synthetic plastic in 1907. Plastic production really ticked up beginning in the 1950’s and since then “annual production of plastics increased nearly 230-fold to 460 million tons in 2019,” according to Our World in Data.
Yet today, it’s easy to find people, including many Youtubers and other progressive influencers, placing all the blame on the industries that produce so much waste.
It’s undeniable that both industries and governments themselves need to change the way they do business as soon as possible, but I have lived in many countries around the world and one thing I’ve noticed when I’ve gone food shopping in the U.S, Japan, Spain and Colombia is that I’m usually the only person who brings their own non-disposable bag.
The sound of single use plastic bags being opened and filled with other items (also wrapped in plastic) has become ubiquitous in supermarkets throughout much of the globe.
Here are some fun facts.
Around 91% of plastic is not recycled, and of the five trillion plastic bags produced worldwide every year, it takes up to 1,000 years for a single bag to completely disintegrate, while 14 million tons of plastic end up in the world’s oceans on an annual basis.
And yet, most consumers in today’s supermarkets are indifferent, because plastic is “convenient”.
But it’s “their fault”, not ours, right? The industry, which responds to consumer demand, is solely to blame for the inundation of plastic in our world, which is killing fish, whales, dolphins and sea turtles like never before.
Hey, don’t blame us, the consumers who refuse to bring our own reusable bags to the supermarket, they started it!
A very meaty problem
Many of us claim to be vehemently against environmental degradation and animal cruelty while also refusing to let go of our burgers and steaks (or at least embrace their plant-based substitutes).
Estimates show that the overwhelming majority of farmed animals on Earth are raised on factory farms, where they are tightly crammed into industrial warehouses with little to no sunlight or fresh air, and numerous investigations have shown the immense cruelty that regularly takes place for the production of meat, dairy and eggs.
Animal agriculture, whether it takes place in cruel factory farms or out in the open is, for the most part, extremely damaging to the environment, and is the leading driver of rainforest deforestation and freshwater consumption, and among the leading contributors to climate change.
Yet global meat consumption has more than tripled over the last 50 years and today, over 70 billion land animals are bred into a miserable existence each year before having their throats slit.
But surprise surprise, consumers are merely the victims of the meat industry, whose executives go house to house, forcing animal parts down people’s throats as they scream and kick, begging them to stop for the sake of the animals and the environment.
The global south, merely victims of McDonald’s
Many people like to imagine residents of places like Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia as being in total harmony with nature. Of course, they were born in the trees and it’s in their blood.
Movies often portray Colombia as a country where exotic animals run freely through the jungle, where people live in homes with thatched roofs and drink nothing more than water and coconut milk (not to mention the common portrayal of the average Colombian as a murderous drug lord who also happens to live in “harmony” with nature in the jungle).
Many people are surprised when they travel to Colombia for the first time to see the country’s cities filled with shopping malls, fast food chains (some local, some American) on nearly every corner, as well as highways packed with the latest SUV’s, and of course, lots of smog.
A friend of mine from Medellin recently told me when the first McDonald’s sprawled up in the city people waited in line from the crack of dawn to get a taste of the junk food Americans had already been addicted to for years.
I’ve heard progressives both in developed countries and in Colombia itself ramble on about how places like the U.S “imposed” this consumerist culture in a place that was traditionally “in harmony with nature”.
However, I have yet to see a Colombian cry about how the Americans came and forced them to purchase that SUV while cramming that Big Mac into their mouth and then obligating them to spend the rest of the day at the latest shopping mall that sprouted up this year.
But let’s keep blaming the first world imperialists, because we all know it’s their fault.
Reality
Cynicism aside, we love to oversimplify reality and try to interpret the world as a battle between good guys and bad guys, with one culprit and one victim.
We love to blame our problems, addictions, and outright lazy behaviours on outside forces, on an individual, regional, and national level.
It’s always easier to believe that some well-hidden, shadowy elite is behind all the world’s problems and we, the ordinary hard-working middle-class citizens of the world, are merely the victims of those powerful beings behind the curtain.
This is the reason so many conspiracy theories, embraced by both the far-right and far-left, have become so popular over the years.
But, like the naïve children that we are, we fail to realize that those dark figures behind the curtain, pulling the strings of reality, are nothing more than the shadows of ourselves.
If we really want the world to change for the better, perhaps we should stop pointing fingers and start making some adjustments to the way that person in the mirror handles business.
Now put your smartphone down and go brush your teeth, it’s past your bedtime kiddo!
If you’re a passionate reader then you may very well fall in love with my fiction novel The Shadow in the Mirror, where you can find out what’s actually going on with Harold Hopkins (genre: paranormal suspense).
Harold’s only wish is to lead a normal life. Yet for reasons he can’t comprehend, he is shunned by all living things. No matter how hard he tries, he is unable to garner attention from the woman he loves, nor can he foster genuine friendships or find a decent job. Meanwhile, since childhood, he has been haunted by his own reflection in the mirror, which frequently acts as a window to another world. The person on the other side is everything Harold wishes he could be, like a clone of himself leading the fruitful life he was destined to lead. He finally sets off in search of answers, where he learns about the unearthly events that took place when he was born, and discovers the tantalizing truth about his own existence…
Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle here.
