When it comes to being a kid, I feel there are certain rites of passage.
Semi-serious biking accidents (I still have a quarter-sized scar from where a metal mailbox took a chunk out of my leg).
Touching something that either bubbles or full-on sears off your skin (a lightbulb in the dressing room preceding a big ballet recital and melted chocolate right before a Tae Kwon Do lesson. I tell you I had *chef’s kiss* timing as a kid).
Destroying electronics (I had a fondness for sticking crayons in VHS players, USB ports, and electrical sockets).
Picasso-ing the wall with every writing instrument available (excepting, of course, those that are erasable).
And, perhaps most commonly, cutting chunks of your (or your sibling’s hair) clean off.
Now!
I’ve done all of the above, but there is one fairly common rite I skipped:
Getting an appendage slammed in a doorjamb is an experience I missed.
I was thinking about that recently because I watched Steve Martin’s The Pink Panther over Christmas, and beyond noticing how much PG-13+ innuendo went not only over my head but right past my face, one scene brought up a latent memory wherein I was not the slam-ee but the slam-er (The Nicole to my cousin’s Clouseau) of a finger.
Now, unlike what happened in that scene, my cousin wasn’t running her finger along the door.
Actually, a group of us cousins were running helter skelter away from her.
See, we were playing a very serious game of tag.
She was “it” (and long-legged).
And it just so happened that as she was closing in, the back bedroom came into our line of sight.
It was big enough we would all fit and the door–the blessed door–had a lock on it.
Decision made, we bolted towards it and poured inside, slamming the door shut and locking it with her on the outside.
Most of her, that is.
Unaccountably, her fingertip had made its way in.
As you can probably imagine, a bit of hysteria ensued, and when all was said and done, she had what one might conservatively call a pretty serious boo-boo.
Adults poured into the room, and after it was established her finger was miraculously still intact, said digit was iced and wrapped (the tip a rather alarming shade of purple-red).
It was then that the parental inquisition began, and, like any self-respecting troupe of adolescents will do, a veritable cornucopia of excuses were produced.
And tactless as it may have been given the finger-centric circumstances, finger-pointing was, in our minds, the obvious thing to do.
“She did it!”
“It wasn’t me!”
“It was him!”
“Kids.”
“No, you!”
“Kids!”
“It was an accident! We were just playi–”
“KIDS!”
“What about her? If she hadn’t stuck her hand in–”
Et cetera et cetera ad infinitum.
Now, we were all little kids, but something I’ve found in adulthood is that the propensity to finger point persists!
In fact, it’s been my studied observation that when fecal matter hits the fan or someone gets stepped on or an appendage gets slammed, very often our (or at least my) first impulse is to do this:
While I adore The Office, I feel it must be said that finger-pointing at everyone else in the room is not, shall we say, the most mature approach to dealing with minor and/or major interpersonal boo boos.
AND SO!
Today I’d like to discuss it 🙂
Specifically, I’d like to discuss the three approaches I think we most often take when placing blame and illustrate how they’re all…
Not great.
They are as follows!
- Blame The Door
- Blame The Bystanders
- Blame The Person Who Stuck Their Finger In The Way
Again, I hope to show how each of these are deficient by virtue of the fact they make the person pointing (e.g. you and me) impotent, primitive, and/or vicious, but worry not!
I also hope to offer an alternative 🙂
Let’s begin!
Option #1: You Can Blame “The Door”
Of the typical finger pointing recipients, this one is probably the least likely to cause offense.
Because when we blame “the door” that got slammed–i.e. the ambient, inanimate, and/or abstract circumstances surrounding the incident–what we’re saying, in essence, is this:
What happened is no one’s fault, per se.
It’s just that a nexus formed, like, say, a game of tag and an eminently slammable door, and in that perfect storm, a finger became more rubicund than it had ever been before.
In Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, there’s actually a scene where this happens!
It occurs early on right after the protagonist Blanche’s pregnant sister Stella gets full-on smacked by her husband Stanley for interrupting his and his friends’ poker match.
Stanley’s friends manage to pull him off her, though not without effort, and it’s then that his friend Mitch says this:
“Poker should not be played in a house with women.”
Put another way:
“Slammable doors should not be in a house with children.”
In either instance, the character and/or behavior of the smackers and slammers are never addressed.
In truth, it verges on ridiculous to consider what you would need to do to attenuate such circumstances.
I mean, I guess you could remove all the doors in your house whenever children come over and ban women from Atlantic City and Las Vegas (I’m not totally opposed to that 🙂 ), but in a practical sense, blaming the circumstances often ends with a shrug and some iteration of
“Welp. That’s too bad. Hope it doesn’t happen again.”
i.e. “Nothin’ I can do about it.”
Moreover!
There’s no limit to the circumstances you can point fingers at.
I mean, the refrain of the murderer and thief Tom Chaney whenever he’s confronted in Charles Portis’ True Grit is
“Everything is against me!”
Like, sir. You are a murderer, and you think everything else is to blame?
Belle = my not impressed face.
And yet!
If we want to, and often we (or at least I) do want to find anything and anyone else to take the rap, there’s no shortage of places or people for us to point at.
Which brings me to finger pointing option #2!
Option #2: You Can Blame The Bystanders
Honestly, this one is probably the most frequent and frankly intuitive type of finger-pointing there is.
Certainly in the aforementioned tag/finger incident, it was the method we slamm-ers saw as the most expedient, and from being a childcare volunteer, I can attest that kids as young as 15 months know how to do this:
And it makes a lot of sense!
Because even little ones can grasp that some things (e.g. a door being slammed and bolted, a rocket shooting out of a carriage, or, say, a cat being petrified) cannot be attributed to mere happenstance.
In such instances, there has to be a guilty party attached.
And given the chance, you can bet said party is going to try and redirect because he/she know what’s incoming from the average plaintiff:
Faced with the prospect of being hung by the thumbs in a dungeon or whatever form of reprisal one might expect (spanking, sacking, public humiliation, toy confiscation, etc.), the self-preserving, discomfort averse person is going to find someone else, potentially anyone else, to point fingers at.
And while it’s most often going to be the other people at the scene, it doesn’t have to be.
One of my absolute favorite West Side Story songs “Dear Officer Krupke” illustrates the near infinite reach of option #2 finger-pointing beautifully.
The song begins with said Officer Krupke telling Riff,
“Gimme one good reason for not draggin’ you down to the station house, ya punk!”
Riff’s reason is immediate:
“Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
Ya gotta understand
It’s just our bringin’ upke
That gets us outta hand!
Our mothers all are junkies!
Our fathers all are drunks!
Golly Moses, natcherly we’re punks!”
Forget pointing at the other people on the scene, it’s really mom and dad’s fault their behavior isn’t what it ought to be.
Now, don’t get me wrong.
I 100% agree with Proverbs 13:24: “Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them.”
From what I’ve seen, a lot of parents sow their own heartache by being derelict and letting their kids run wild and “free.”
However.
When I think about the people who are quick to point fingers when Officer Krupkes come calling, whether at the other people at the scene or stretching back into their family tree, I invariably think of the infamous duo Leopold and Loeb.
Two well-to-do UChicago students who murdered and mutilated a child in 1924 because…
They wanted to.
In coming to their defense, famed attorney Clarence Darrow offered an option #2 finger point par excellence:
“This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor. Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.”
Blame an ancestor? Check.
Blame Nietzsche? Check.
Blame UChicago? Also check.
It’s worth-noting that Leopold and Loeb each said the other had done the actual killing when questioned.
Basically, they were using their whole hand to point in every direction that wasn’t at them.
Hardly the Übermenschen they’d cast themselves as.
In fact!
I’m no Darwinian, but there’s a real irony to the fact that these “superior men” resorted to flinging their fecal matter in every direction like chimps when some of it hit the fan.
And that’s what option #2 finger pointing ultimately is.
Throwing your s*** around like a chimp.
It’s not a good look, to say the least.
And yet…
Option #3 is the one that turns you into a beast.
Option #3: You Can Blame The Person Who Stuck Their Finger In The Way
This one is the most pernicious of the three.
Because while blaming “the door” makes you impotent and blaming the bystanders makes you an immature chimpanzee, blaming the slamm-ee sets you on the path to monstrosity.
How?
Well, if #1 and #2 say, “No one’s to blame! Bad things just happen, Okay?” and “Everyone even tangentially related to me–but not me–is to blame,” respectively, what #3 says is:
“You know who’s to blame? The cry baby who stuck their finger in the way.”
The real problem is that they’re raising a racket in my face and whining to everyone that they’re in pain.
Everything would be fixed if they’d just shut up and
Go.
Away.
That, my friends, will put you on the path to Claude Frollo-ness posthaste!
If you aren’t familiar, Claude Frollo is the villain in Hunchback of Notre Dame, and his song “Hellfire” gives my Tim Burton-loving sister the heebie-jeebies to this day.
The portion most relevant for our purposes occurs midway:
“It’s not my fault!
I’m not to blame!
It is the gypsy girl–the witch who set this flame!
It’s not my fault!
If in God’s plan
He made the Devil so much stronger than a man!”
First of all, per James 4:7, that last bit is theologically incorrect.
All we have to do is resist, and the devil does a full on SPRINT in the other direction.
Honestly, his walk-on song should be Mooski’s “Track Star.”
He’s a runner/ he’s a track star/ He gon’ run away when it gets hard/ He can’t take the pain, he can’t get scarred [But he CAN be crushed beneath our feet–see Romans 16:20]/ he hurt anyone that gets involved.
Anyways!
Back to Claude Frollo’s serenade.
He ends it with an emphatic
“Choose me or your pyre! Be mine or you will BUUUURRRNNN!”
Which is… not the best way to conclude a love letter.
That being said, the victim-blaming Frollo does is 100% what we should expect given that he’s a “righteous man” who now can’t stop himself from wanting in a gypsy’s pants.
I think this description from Shusaku Endo’s Silence captures Frollo’s situation best:
“A defeated man will use any form of self-deception in order to defend himself.”
And for Claude Frollo, self-defense means taking Esmerelda–the woman he’s both persecuting and lusting after–out.
Which, TBH, is very on brand for him because in the opening scene of the movie he’s described like this:
“He sought to rid the world of vice and sin and he saw corruption everywhere except within.”
That’s a real problem for him.
And for most people, I suspect.
I’m certainly prone to seeing fault everywhere without and not within.
And that tendency is ultimately, I believe, responsible for the vast majority of issues we experience relationally, particularly when dealing with post-slam injuries, because what it does, in the end, is keep us from taking any responsibility for the situation.
After all, we’re perfect so we couldn’t possibly have contributed to something injurious.
Friends.
1 John 1:8 says,
“If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
Thus, according to The Big Man Himself, acknowledging our own faults is a must.
And listen, I totally get that the absolute last thing we want to do when a door gets slammed on a hapless hand or an argument devolves into ad hominems is take even an iota of responsibility for the situation we suddenly find ourselves in.
But to our reluctance, God, in 1 John 1:9, offers a promise:
“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
I think that’s pretty amazing.
That doing as T-Swift recently did–pointing the finger not out, but in:
Triggers a promise given by The One who holds THE WHOLE UNIVERSE in His hands to forgive us and get rid of all our unrighteousness.
Pretty incredible.
And, at least for me, it puts a whole ‘nother spin on taking responsibility in unpleasant situations 🙂
So that’s my recommendation, friends!
The next time you find yourself tempted to point fingers at “the door,” the bystanders, and/or the person who stuck their finger in the way, own up to the part you played–don’t equivocate–and watch and wait because God will be on the move, forgiving your sin and making you brand spanking new!
If you want to know what that’s looked like in my life, please feel free to drop me a line!
Always down to talk about Jesus Christ!
No list of sins I have not done
No list of virtues I pursue
No list of those I am not like
Can earn myself a place with You
O God, be merciful to me
I am a sinner through and through
My only hope of righteousness
Is not in me, but only You
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