A RELUCTANCE TO ESTABLISH BLAME

Gail Russell Chaddock writes in the CSMonitor today that throughout the nation, "from schools to security," people are unwilling to place blame when events or decisions go wrong. She argues that our politicians, unlike European politicians, are unwilling to resign when bad things happen on their watch. Ms. Chaddock cites a recent education poll from Phi Delta Kappan that shows 26% of people rate all public schools nationwide with either an A or B; but, ask them about their local school and 47% give the school an A or B. She also cites a recent Cook Political Report that shows only about 50% of voters approve of the job Congress is doing, but almost no incumbents will have any problem getting reelected this year.

All of these facts just go to show, according to Ms. Chaddock, that although we are willing to talk about accountability, we are NOT willing to lay blame on individuals or groups. We want our schools to perform at a high level and to meet certain accountability standards, but we are unwilling to blame this school, this administrator, or this teacher. Why? One reason, in my opinion, might be that we are afraid to blame the school or to blame the teacher because what if somebody decided to blame ME, the parent? We want Congress to perform at a certain level and we expect them to meet certain prescribed standards that may only exist in our heads, but we do not want to lay the blame on MY Congress member because he/she has done many good things for this district. We have new business, we have new roads, or we have this new 'pork-barrel' project. Government waste only exists in everybody else's district.

Ms. Chaddock questions why national security leaders remain in their jobs even after the failure to identify the 9-11 plot, even after intelligence failures that led to the War on Iraq, and even after failures by the NSC to effectively direct the Coalition Provisional Authority and reconstruction efforts in Iraq. These leaders fall into the typical response that 'I am not to blame. Things were outside of my control." Today, we all tend to find the fault not in ourselves, but in the OTHER--in the words of "Robert Pfaltzgraff, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, 'It comes down to a feeling that if something goes wrong, I am the victim of forces in society that operate against me, instead of the consequences of decisions I have taken for better or worse'."