Donald Trump has made me virtuous
A couple of days ago I ripped the bottom out of my car by driving over a dragon’s-teeth barrier on the driveway to a golf club where an excellent gig of Brazillian music was taking place. I don’t feel too guilty about it. The immediate cause of the accident wasn’t my bad driving but the sudden glare of a low sun that dazzled me at the worst moment. My wife didn’t see the barrier either.
Not good, but not a tragedy either, nor cause to beat myself up. I made practical arrangements to fix the problem, enjoyed the gig, sighed philosophically and moved on. And I wouldn’t mention the matter except for the response of one of my passengers.
She knew the incident wasn’t my “fault” and, to console me, drew the conclusion that it must be someone else’s “fault”: in this case the golf club management for not anticipating the problem and providing better signage or whatever. However, this consolation completely failed to work. In fact it mildly annoyed me. Hence this blog
I belong to the “shit happens, fix it and move on” school. I don’t believe in awarding myself the consolation prize of blaming other people unless I am realistically going to do something about it. Otherwise, in addition the original problem I now have a second one: namely a feeling of resentment that some guilty bastard has got away with it.
In this instance blaming the golf club management would achieve nothing. As it happens, I don’t think they did anything wrong, though in an ideal world there could be better advance warning before the barrier. More to the point, the only guaranteed outcome of pursuing them is a continuing and probably increasing sense of resentment until the problem is resolved, plus the expenditure of time and cash to pursue the matter, and, in the end, only a purely speculative chance of getting some sort of recompense.
Emotionally and financially, blaming someone else for what happened to my car is a seriously bad deal.
Even as my friend was giving me her take on this incident in the hope of making me feel better (because she is a kind woman), I was thinking of Donald Trump, who cannot accept responsibility for anything and always aggressively blames other people. Indeed his inner life seems to be chewed to pieces by his resentments.
The fact that I have acted in a way that the Donald would not have acted, makes me fairly confident I made the right decision.
JW 29.6.18