Everyone Needs an Excuse

From Buzzsaw Haircut, the literary magazine of my alma mater:
“I’ve cheated on every boyfriend I’ve had. It’s not that they aren’t good enough for me, I just can’t help myself sometimes. I’ve never heard of this gene, and maybe it’s the reason I am more likely to cheat.”

This is from an article about a gene that supposedly makes people more likely to be unfaithful. Ok, now we are just getting silly. As science has become more precise, so have excuses. Whatever happened to just doing bad things because we’re human?

That is the problem. There is a human desire to make everything somebody else’s fault. Responsibility is never our own. We were made with something bad in us, so when it comes out, well, I couldn’t help it.

As a society, we need to admit our failings and not look for ways to make it not our fault. We’re human. We screw up. But that doesn’t make it some cosmic thing out of our control. We’re all unique, but we aren’ t all just a collection of genes that makes decisions for us. Take some responsibility.