To blame is to interrupt responsibility
June 14, 2023
Dear reader,
“There’s a bunch of ‘em. Over here.”
“Polliwogs?” I said. I’d been floating down the West River Sunday afternoon. We’d pulled our tubes onto a sandbar for a break with other families.
A young boy whose family I had met at the put-in at Rock River was pointing at a still pool of water cut off from the river itself.
“Tadpoles!” I said.
“Small ones,” he agreed.
“Really small!”
“There are more up here,” he said, walking to a pool upstream.
“They’re bigger here,” I said. He nodded.
We both walked up to the highest pool.
“Look at that one!”
“The biggest!”
We paused and looked up, noticing each other.
“I was talking and you listened to me and here we are,” he said.
“Here we are,” I agreed.
Thoughts said out loud become dialogue. Dialogue becomes action, a journey taken together.
A minute later he was off to explore on his own, hopping across rocks toward the deepest spot on the river. He smiled back at me and uttered, “I’m going deep, baby.”
A day later, I was on my own exploration. Why was the lid on the recycling bin under the kitchen counter stuck open? I knew the answer—the bin couldn’t take another can, or any of the last five. I grabbed an empty box and started pulling items out.
As I did, I noticed the inside walls of the bin moving. We leave the front door to the deck open a lot. We had a chipmunk visitor one summer.
A cute critter would have been more welcome. This was something else—a creature crawling out the filth that generated it.
“Maggots,” I said out loud. Perhaps the hard consonants of the word helped me express my shock. I was repulsed, then compelled to finish cleaning. I pulled out every last item, drenched in wretchedness.
As fast as my disgust rose, another thought was right behind.
“Who did this?” I said, again to no one.
I knew that the most likely culprit was the one about to clean it up. To those readers who wash out every recyclable before putting it in the bin, I salute you. Cleaned cans are both more recyclable, and less gross. And yet, sometimes it’s beyond me.
Despite my past run-ins with recycling hygiene, it’s never been this bad. I felt disgusted. What happened?
Just as quickly, I looked for someone to blame.
I thought of my girlfriend, whose orange cartons are not recyclable here, as I remind her when I have to remove them from the recycling. But she rinses things, or puts them in the trash. I had to keep looking.
“Jack!” I thought.
Jack lives on our farm and often cooks with us. We never had maggots before Jack. My hypothesis clicked together. I’ve seen Jack not follow all the rules. I’ve had to pull kitchen knives and wooden spatulas out of the dishwasher because of him. My anger welled up. How could he leave such a mess behind for me to clean up? Inconsiderate.
“We have met the enemy and he is ours,” said Commodore Perry to Major General Harrison during the War of 1812, in a timeless statement of braggadocio.
As I emptied the bin, I looked for something egregious. What used food container could I pin on Jack?
I’ll never know. I got to the bottom of the bin and only found the usual assemblage of empties. I found nothing more suspicious than a can of tuna with a few flakes remaining. A brown haze on the side of the bin seemed to be all it took to breed fly larvae.
“We have met the enemy and he is us,” said Pogo, in a 1970 comic strip.
Jack, I’m sorry I ever doubted you. But I don’t regret it. In looking for blame, I found myself.
Disgust is a motivator. I wanted to get rid of what created it and never see it again. How did this happen? Who did it? I was problem-solving, testing hypotheses.
There’s nothing wrong with pointing at Jack, for a moment. Jack might have done it. But theories about who did it are counterproductive in the kitchen we share. The moment I hold myself to a better standard of action is the moment I ask the same of others.
Jack sets a farm record for number of pieces of firewood in the bucket.
If my story centers blame, it’s a broken story.
These events unfolded at a time when Vermont is ending our COVID-era support for general housing assistance. With the help of the feds, it seemed like we had ended homelessness. Now we’re evicting folks. I’m disgusted.
And just as quickly, blame is going around. I hear some saying the Scott Administration didn’t plan for this. I hear some saying that the Legislature, in which I serve, has chosen by policy to leave folks behind. How could we?
We’ve been here before. In 1797, in the wake of the upheaval following the American Revolution, Vermont passed a law to take care of those who can’t “maintain themselves.” We required towns to “provide for them houses, nurses, physicians, and surgeons.”
Thus started our Legislature’s unbroken record of addressing homelessness and universal healthcare, while still falling short.
Next week we’ll mark another chapter as we complete the budget for next year. We’ll allocate more money and offer more services. Will we “solve” homelessness? I doubt it. It’s a symptom of issues around the globe.
More than money and programs we need a stronger society, one that can produce consensus on how to face hard problems.
Not one step toward that healed society will be taken in blame. Blame works for reconnaissance only. The finger pointing outward must make the roundtrip back if we are to change anything.
The problems we face are vast. And yet, when we hitch our purpose to a vision—tadpoles!—we can do our utmost to bring ourselves there.
Warmly,
Tristan Roberts
Quill Nook Farm