I was listening to a different radio station than I normally do a few days ago, due to large-area rain storms which was creating havoc for the station to which I normally listen. I heard a song which I had never heard before. Maybe it was a recently-released song, or maybe it was several years old. I don’t know. I do not know the name of the song, or the artist(s) who performed it.
Regardless, what struck at me was the lyrics, the words of the song. Essentially, the song set out a situation where a man is speaking figuratively to his ex-lover. Apparently, the ex-lover left/rejected the man sometime previously. The man has now gone out and located another lover and is speaking to his former lover from the perspective of being with the new lover.
The man says (essentially, and not a direct quote) “Look what you have made me do.”
Obviously, the man is still very emotionally invested in the previous lover, and is saying, “I still love you, but you left me and now look what I have to do because of you.” In essence, the man is blaming the former lover for the man’s action of going out and finding, then taking, another lover with whom the man is not emotionally invested. It may be just a one-night stand, or possibly a short-term relationship built on nothing but sex and mutual need/desire. It may be the beginning of a true and deep relationship. Who can know at this stage?
My point is this; the man is blaming the ex-lover for the man’s action of taking a new lover with whom the man is not “in love.”
Maybe is it just my age. Maybe it is just my experience and/or cynicism levels. But I am struck by the horrible and inaccurate scenario painted by the lyrics! In essence, this song is teaching others who listen to it that it is okay and perfectly reasonable to blame others for your own actions. Hell, maybe it is true. We see it happen all the time in the news as crimes of passion are played out and the perpetrators almost universally say, “Look what (they-the victims) made me do!”
A good, politically acceptable turn of phrase here would be “Rubbish!” What I say is “Bullshit!”
It is time for people, all people, from the lowest social standing to the highest, to take responsibility for their own thoughts and actions. Every human is responsible for his or her own thoughts, and what they actually do about those thoughts. We each are responsible for the decisions we make and the actions we carry out each day. No one “makes” us feel in any specific way, or “makes” us do specific actions as adults. We choose.
One of the primary contributors to this,”they made me do this” mentality, where blaming others for our own actions is somehow an acceptable excuse, is the way that our political leadership have glommed onto this attitude and use it constantly in the media. In all actuality, this attitude comes from bullying! It is used by terrorists and torturers. The corollary is, “If you just stop what you are doing and do what I need/want, I won’t have to do (this).”
If you give me your lunch money now, I won’t have to beat you up any more. If you tell me the secret plans now I won’t have to tear out any more fingernails. If you will only vote to support my plan, my bill, I won’t have to extort you by shutting down programs you endorse. It is YOUR FAULT that I have to (beat you up, torture you, extort you by harming others you feel responsible for). YOU can make it stop by simply giving me what I want.
Bullshit! Take some self-pride, man. If you are a bully, then be proud of being a bully, and say to your victim, “I am still going to beat you up even if you give me your lunch money, just because I like to beat on you. But, I may beat you a little less if you give it up now. Either way, I don’t care, and either way you get hurt as much as I want to hurt you, just because I can.”
If you’re a criminal, then be proud and say to the world, “I blew up that church because I wanted to! It made me feel better about myself. I don’t care about hurting innocent people at all because my pain is so great I cannot feel anything but my own pain.”
If you’re a criminal politician, be proud of it! Own it, man! Say to the media, “I committed to that campaign promise! I committed to it so deeply that I do not care if it is a stupid thing based on emotional manipulation. I committed to it and I am so stupid that I am going to follow it through regardless of the consequences. I will not listen to anyone who tells me I am wrong, and I will fire or publicly denigrate anyone who disagrees with me. I will impose sanctions to get my way even at the expense of the American taxpayer, simply because my ego is so huge and so fragile that I dare not expose it to the truth lest it implode.”
Anyone who says, “Look what you/they made me do,” is first, a liar; second, a possible or potential criminal; and third, so self-delusional as to be a danger to those around them.
I don’t care what prevailing, generational attitudes might be. This issue speaks to the core of individual humanity within each of us. Either we take responsibility for our selves and our own choices, decisions and actions, or, we choose to blame someone else for those things and to lie back and luxuriate in our delusion of “it’s not my fault.”
I am not trying to place any blame on those artists or publishers or radio stations involved with the song lyrics, though, and I want to make that clear. Hell, for all I know they wrote and performed the song as a satirical shout-out against that very attitude.
The trouble with doing something like that, whether it be song lyrics or plays or movies which delineate social inequity or wrong, most people who view/hear that stuff only view/hear that stuff. They do not necessarily hear the writers or the artists in a news interview explaining “why” they produced that stuff.
The public rarely understands satire, as it must be explained to them by someone else. The public only hears/sees what it wants to hear and see. The public is not a socially responsible animal who thinks about what it ingests and how it reacts. I mean, even in Shakespeare’s day, do you really think a miner or a chimney-sweep with a less than stellar education really gave two figs about the satire of W. Shakespeare? No. If they could afford to, they went to the plays to get a short respite of entertainment from their otherwise dreary lives. Nothing more.
The public generally acts like a mob, taking in only what is relevant to each member of the mob and then reacting to it. If the mob seems to surge in the direction of angry response to something, then the bulk of the mob members will follow and support that surge of response regardless of how they might individually feel.
I think it is socially irresponsible to put such garbage out there for public consumption. If it was satire, the artist might point at me and say, “You’re wrong, dude! Look at how you reacted! You reacted positively and actually said something publicly to help eradicate this erroneous and egregious attitude!”
Yeah, well, for every one like me out there, the public has a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, who will hear those lyrics and say to themselves, “Yeah! Fuckin’ A! Look what those bastards MADE ME do!” Who knows whether their next thoughts will have them reaching for a sandwich or some kind of weapon?