These days, people love to blame others. Regardless of whether they got themselves into a mess or not, we in this country love to point the finger and everyone but ourselves. From the time that we are kids trying to get out of being punished for breaking the lamp to the time when we are adults who can’t accept their own stupidity, Americans love to say “Wasn’t me.” This can be a bit of a problem sometimes, though, as when everyone’s trying to pass the buck to someone else, it can often be confusing as to where the buck really stops. It often leads to what the Queen of Hearts did to the card who painted her white roses red…everyone gets punished for it regardless. This ducking of responsibility even goes as high as our government.

No one wants to step up and take the flack for the semi-debacle that is the Iraq War. Bush doesn’t want to admit he sent our soldiers off on flawed intelligence, the CIA doesn’t want to admit that their intelligence was flawed, and Congress doesn’t want to admit that they allowed Bush to go to war. Same way with the economy. No one wants to take responsibility for causing our economic downward spiral, not the government, not the financial companies…not anyone. And so we have the bailout.

I’ve mentioned this before, but AIG and all the rest MISHANDLED THEIR BUSINESS. They made bad deals, gave out bad loans to people who can’t pay them off anyway, and gave out huge lines of credit like they were giving money to charity. They screwed up. Why now are people perfectly content with letting these companies pass the blame and the consequences onto the people of the United States?

Despite my best hopes, the bailout…excuse me, “rescue plan”, is still alive because the Senate passed the bill 74-25. This is quite the turnover from Monday’s 225-208 rejection by the House. Whether it was because of the record drop on Monday or the rebound the day after, but mostly because of the media pounding it into people’s heads that the failure of the bailout was a tragedy, enough Senators were swayed to bring life back into Frankenstein’s monster. And just like Frankenstein’s monster, this bailout is going to wreak havoc on our towns and cities…through our wallets.

We are refusing to hold the true culprits for the mortgage and house crises responsible. We are refusing to point the finger at the banks and credit companies and saying, “You mismanaged our money. We demand accountability from you!” Instead, we are letting the same “don’t blame me” culture that sparks frivolous lawsuits put a gun to the head of our economy. We are letting ourselves fall in the very trap that President Thomas Jefferson did everything he could to prevent us from getting into…becoming overly-reliant on the rest of the world. Jefferson’s “let alone” policy lead us to an era of unparalleled expansion and strength, and it was in those times at the turn of the 19th century that forged a fledgling country into a world-effecting nation. In the last half-century or so, however, we have undone everything that was done in the first century and a quarter to make us strong, and now we have become as dependent on the world as the world has been on us.

We have allowed this country to become weakened all because we can’t take responsibility for our own problems. To compensate, we have to get ourselves involved in everyone else’s problems so no one recognizes just how screwed up we here in America are getting. The way to begin getting ourselves out of this hole begins with realizing that we are our own worst enemies. Not terrorists, not socialism…the problem lies with us. Once we own up to that and decide to clean up our own messes, that’s when the US will begin to regain not only its internal integrity but its relationships with other countries…relationships that we forged while we were learning to be a self-reliant republic. And one of the first steps to that is to go to the people responsible for the mortgage crisis and telling them where they can go and what they can do when they get there with what uncomfortable object.