By Don Feder, Creators Syndicate, Inc.
March 1994 – In value-free America, non-judgmentalism has reached its dead end. Not only are we not allowed to pass judgment on people, we can’t even characterize animals.
In Hooksett, New Hampshire, on Christmas Day, an Alaskan malamute dog named Sasquatch killed a 5-year-old boy. Commenting on the tragedy, Christopher Agrafiotis, the town’s animal control officer, observed: “We don’t know that (Sasquatch) is a vicious animal. But ... that was a vicious act.”
If the context weren’t so horrible, the remark would be hilarious. We wouldn’t want to stigmatize the poor pooch. We don’t know what led him to this desperate act. Sasquatch could have been an abused pup, the product of a dysfunctional kennel. Was his crime a bark for help? You know the routine.
If there’s one thing we’re good at in America today, it’s not assigning blame. Over our public policy debate should be posted a sign reading “Excuses R Us.”
In mid-December, a study disclosed that 83% of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cheated at least once on a homework assignment or test during the 1991-92 school year.
Norma McGavern, director of undergraduate research at MIT, observed: “Of course it’s worrisome, but we’re not looking at this in a moralistic way, to say people who do this are bad and they’re beyond helping.”
If not “bad,” what would you call them—honorable, trustworthy, paragons of virtue? Little wonder that such high percentages of college kids are admitted cheats, when our culture can’t bring itself to unequivocally condemn conduct that’s clearly wrong.
Whatever you did, there’s a justification. The search for exculpating circumstances is a never-ending quest. Absurd lengths aren’t a bit too far to go to rationalize the inexcusable.
Discussion of the AIDS crisis is brimming with blame avoidance. Those infected are all victims activists insist. AIDS isn’t caused by homosexual promiscuity, it’s caused by a virus, a spokesman for the gay community disingenuously declared. Don’t ask how the virus is spread.
In New York City, Patti Davis (daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan) – the ultimate I’m-OK gal – is conducting seminars on how to successfully blame your family for messing up your life.
We’ve sanitized our language to facilitate blame avoidance. Instead of fornicators, we speak of cohabiting couples. Addicts (junkies) have become drug abusers. Criminals are offenders, as if they had merely transgressed the bounds of etiquette. Or how about the homeless – formerly bums, winos or vagrants. The new term is nicely neutral, implying that all denizens of the streets are bereft of habitation by an act of God, certainly through no fault of their own.
Needless to say, no one is guilty of anything. Separate California juries are pondering the fate of Lyle and Erik Menendez, the Beverly Hills brothers who blew away their mother and father in a volley of shotgun blasts, for a $14 million family fortune.
What should have been an open-and-shut case turned into a five-month, three-ring circus. Erik and Lyle, alleged victims of childhood sexual abuse, murdered their parents out of fear their folks were plotting to do them in, their wily attorney (playing to the temper of the times) argued.
Poor Lyle was so traumatized by years of abuse that after massacring Mom and Pop, he spent $15,000 on Rolex watches and $70,000 on a Porsche. It’s amazing what an expensive sports car can do to salve a psychic wound.
Liberal dogma and the therapy culture have combined to foster our current aversion to assigning blame and taking responsibility; the two go hand in hand. Why, heavens to Freud, finger pointing might give someone a complex. Above all, we want people to feel good about themselves, whether or not that sentiment is warranted. Besides, we know it’s all environmental or genetic or societal or political or anything but volitional.
Ask not why there are 23,000 murders a year in this country, why the most horrific crimes imaginable daily assault us from the news pages. Poverty, injustice, guns? During the Depression there were more of each, and the crime rate actually declined. What they had, which we are rapidly losing, is a sense of shame. Moral issues then were black and white and not soothing, conscience anesthetizing shades of gray.
Sasquatch was put to sleep last week, in an apt metaphor for our moral sensibilities. The malamute was destroyed, not executed. Programmed by nature or training, animals aren’t responsible for their behavior. People are. But how can they understand that if no one is ever held accountable? 
