Whose Fault?

Morning classes and then off to the market. Walking down the road into town, body soaked in sweat from the heat, the marketplace energy and swirl of activity and I was time-traveling, leaping over years and borders in my imagination to similar places with similar feelings. Kerala, India/Java/  Bali/ Costa Rica/ Ghana (in 1999)/ Fiji/ Cuba/ Bangkok and other tropical places where you take two or three showers a day, your skin relaxes its border duty, the shorts, short-sleeved shirts, Teevahs and sometimes sarongs or lungis come out of the closet, the roosters sing you awake, a ceiling fan lulls you to sleep, the days are long and the tempos are slow. Different soundtracks for all these places, mostly live drumming, gamelan, xylophones and such, but all connected and delightfully so. I love it. 

 

Rode on a back of a motorcycle to our lunch place and burned my leg a bit, but not enough to reduce the pleasure of eating red-red (a bean dish), plaintains and rice with some of the most delightful people I’ve had a pleasure to meet and know. Of course, I say that with many groups and mean it, but there is a special easy-going harmony amongst us and it is a grand pleasure. 

 

Back to the hotel, I went over tomorrow’s xylophone class with a new co-teacher (Hope), actually sat and read a book a bit. I began with great enthusiasm with The Body Knows the Score and still am underlining like mad hearing him say ideas and truths I already know with different words and a lifetime of clinical practice treating trauma. Complementary to my lifetime of trying to avoid trauma by getting things right in the first place. More to come after I finish the book. Which, truth be told, is not entirely pleasant to read in my little corner of paradise as the author tells about the billions of dollars spent on drugs that miss the core of the disease and the hundreds of thousands of people knee-deep in trauma, much of it because we’ve made such piss-poor decisions about what it means to live together well, still chasing the almighty dollar, holding on to our unearned privileges of white skin and male body parts. 

 

Speaking of which, our new xylophone song this morning has a text that says, “A man gets drunk and blames the bartenders for selling him the beer.” So the question arises, “Who really is to blame? The implied moral is “Take responsibility for your own actions.” And I agree. And perhaps it’s too much to assign any blame to the bartender.

 

But what about the person who sells an assault rifle to an underage mentally unstable minor who goes on a school shooting spree? Might they deserve some of the blame? The school system that refuses to meet the needs of its students and chooses not to welcome them, value them, love them. Might they take some of the blame when the youth chooses to be known for his criminal behavior? What about the drug companies and physicians who prescribed opioids and made them widely available? Might they take some of the blame for the epidemic of addictions? 

 

You get the idea. So I say, “Both/And.” Each individual should indeed take responsibility for his or her own actions, shortcomings and transgressions. But so should a culture take responsibility for caring for its citizens and creating the conditions necessary to raise healthy and fulfilled human beings. 

 

That was my takeaway from the morning’s xylophone class, once again made poignant by all we’re experiencing here. And along with the intriguing question it posed, it’s a pretty great xylophone piece!