"They"

I guess shifting blame and shirking responsibilities comes naturally to all of us. We're so good at it that even we don't catch ourselves doing it. There are some commonly used expressions that I wish to discuss in this context.

The first two are expressions that refer to those who are the cause of all of the world's misery - 'THEY' or 'PEOPLE'. The mysterious 'THEY' are everywhere and at the root of every problem but are surprisingly invisible to us, or so it would seem. We are quick to blame everything from bad roads to global warming on 'THEIR' apathy. Yet if any of us should be asked to name 'THEM', we'd be hard pressed for answers. The fact of the matter is that 'THEY' is a subconscious euphemism for 'WE'. It's a means of dissociating ourselves from wrongs and therefore from the responsibility of righting those wrongs.

Another commonly misused expression is "in the good old days". Truth is there were never better or worse times. In the larger context of human history, the world has always been just as bright/dark a place as it is today. Granted that there were fluctuations now and then but those are merely temporally localized events...a product of the randomness that characterizes the universe (of course, I'm glad to have skipped the historical times of the world wars and other such world-shaping disasters). However we use phrases such as "in those days" to imply that our predecessors lived in a better time than ours and hence we have a tougher prospect on our hands when it comes to making changes. Another excuse for our laziness!

In fact, we've become so comfortable within our myopic cocoon that should one of us be willing to try and change things, we ridicule him as a fool and an idealist.