Can a Victim Be Responsible?

A woman lets her two-year-old go off in a water park with the child’s four-year-old sibling to watch him. The two year old child drowns. The water park is sued because this mother has lost her child on their grounds. What’s a mother to do when a park lets two year-olds die?
A large energy company is cheating the residents of the nation’s most populous state. The employees and stockholders know what the company is up to but stay on to reap the financial rewards. When the dishonesty of the company becomes overwhelmingly obvious, the company goes bust. The employees lose their jobs, pension benefits and 401 Ks. The stockholders lose all their stock’s value. What are employees and stockholders to do when their company is caught cheating? Why must they suffer the consequences?

People sign up for mortgages they know they cannot afford. Lenders give loans to people they know do not qualify for them. They all think that they will somehow get away with it if the market can rapidly increase toward infinity. The bubble bursts. The borrowers cannot pay and cannot sell their property to pay off their debt. The lenders see their loans go unpaid and the collaterals’ value shrink by the day. And then the market collapses. The new homeowners lose their property and are thrown out into the streets forced to return to wherever they had recently moved up from. The lenders see their jobs and companies threatened. Why must they suffer just because their plan failed?

Two states want to buck their party’s schedule for primaries so that theirs will be first or at least sooner and more influential. The states’ representatives are told that if they hold their primaries early, the votes won’t count. All the candidates agreed not to campaign in those states. In one state, all but one of the candidates took their names off the ballot. The people in the two states knowing the promise that their votes won’t count and knowing that they would be meaningless anyway because no one campaigned in their states, voted anyway.

They were then reminded that their votes would not be counted. They were angry. Why won’t their votes count? It wasn’t their fault their states broke the rules, they didn’t break them. The only candidate who profited from this improper vote had agreed that their vote should not count until the results were in and they were so good. Why shouldn’t this candidate count the votes even though they were improper?

Many of us bought large pickup trucks and SUVs. Some of us did so to keep our family safe in case of a collision not so concerned about the safety of those outside our vehicles. Some of us bought them because we liked having extra space inside not thinking that there will be that much less space outside. Some of us bought them to sit high while driving so we could see over the other cars not realizing that we might be blocking the view of others. We knew that our trucks were gas guzzlers but figured that we could always afford it. We knew that small car owners looked at us with derision but we just figured that they were jealous. Now our trucks are unaffordable to run and are almost impossible to sell. We are now stuck with our gluttonous behemoths. Why must we suffer just because we like things big and now gas prices are too high?
We didn’t set the price OPEC charges for oil.

When do knowing victims of improper actions realize that they themselves may have been the villains in their own tragedy? When do those who at first benefited from the violations of moral conduct accept responsibility for the eventual outcome?

When do we learn the meaning of cause and effect, action and responsibility otherwise known as karma?

Sept. 2008