I am not talking about the hit British television show called “The Blame Game” where news and comedy collide in a satirical Northern Ireland chat show, where members of the public get to ask a panel of comedians their burning questions of the week.

If you haven't seen it you can view
many of the episodes on YouTube. To view one such episode go to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3jB3KBuXpc

However, I said I'm not talking about
that programme but I have just given three paragraphs to it!

I can only blame myself for that and I
blame you for reading it.

The actual meaning of 'the blame game”
according to many dictionaries is “a situation in which people try
to blame each other for something bad that has happened”.

The majority of the American press used
this expression to say Donald Trump was playing the blame game
yesterday when he tweeted it wasn't him to blame for the recession
fears as the US Markets plunged.

Amazingly the same press didn't use
that expression against the many Democratic politicians and
themselves when they blamed Trump for the recent mass shootings.

So, why do we play this game to blame
everyone else?

We can even take it to the other
extreme. There are people who blame themselves for everything, even
when they’ve had nothing to do with an unfortunate outcome. This
isn’t just false modesty or fishing for reassurance; some people do
believe they cause every bad thing all, or most, of the time.

If you are going to blame someone it sometimes, when you can't put the finger on someone else, to blame God. Then, being religious, you can make yourself feel better by attributing the event to God testing your faith. Forgetting, of course, God already knows how strong our faith is.

I found this illustration of blame
interesting, on the website Psychology Today:

“Another related area of research
involves deciding whether someone who commits an immoral act is to
blame. Consider what happens if two people each throw a brick off a
bridge at passing cars. One person’s brick lands harmlessly on the
road, but the other person’s strikes the people in the car,
resulting in a serious accident. Theoretically, the person whose
brick didn’t injure anyone is just as culpable as the one that
did—they both had the same malicious intent. Moral luck is the
belief that you should hold someone to blame only if the action
causes harms to others, not what the intent was. You would therefore
blame the accident-causing brick thrower more than the other.”

What sparked me to write this was the
article we have published today on iNews Cayman “Horrific shootings
are the symptom...the heart is the cause”.

James Gottry is the writer and he opens
with:

“Two deadly shootings last weekend
are two too many. Every American can agree—these tragedies need to
stop. But the agreement ends there. Prayers are offered, but
unbelievably they are condemned. Some politicians earnestly renew the
call for gun control and "assault weapon bans," while
others staunchly oppose such measures. The debate rages on, while the
families of the victims mourn their loved ones and the families of
the shooters try to come to grips with what went wrong. And
collectively, we all wait for what comes next. Something must
change.”

He then proposes “we demand that our
elected officials—those men and women who have the responsibility
to represent "we the people"—stop drawing lines in the
sand and start working together to address this issue.”

In other words stop playing the blame
game.

If we did this and tried to find solutions to the problem(s) and work together, then there may be no need for the blame game at all.