SOMETHING I always hear is every government blaming everything on a previous government. It’s a blame game that doesn’t happen only in the government, it happens just about anywhere. “I cannot get a promotion, because my parents didn’t send me for MBA!” “If I had had a love marriage, not this arranged one, my life wouldn’t be in such a mess!”
When I hear such statements either from political leaders or from individuals, my mind goes back to a trip I made to Washington a few years ago, with a close friend of mine. Right opposite the White House is a shop, which sells paraphernalia and other tit bits which tourists love to buy and take back. Also, in the same shop is a replica of the Oval Office, where you can sit on a replica presidential chair behind an official desk, with the seal of the American president etched on the ground. It’s a great photo op place, and if you have purchased goods over twenty dollars, you’re given an opportunity to pose sitting at the imitation presidential desk, and a picture is taken and given to you by a professional photographer.
Both my friend and I purchased enough to get our pics taken. But as I went to sit at the replica desk of the most powerful man on earth, the photographer found me searching for something, “What you looking for?” he asked. “Where’s the plaque which should be on the desk?” I asked.
“What plaque?” he asked, wanting to be done with the job, and looking at the others standing in line. “The plaque, which says, ‘the buck stops here!” I said, and realizing there was no such plaque on the replica desk, due to some oversight by the imitators, I quickly got my picture taken and moved away. “What was all that about?” asked my friend, and I told him how US President Harry Truman had made a wooden plaque and installed it on the same desk, with these same words, “The buck stops here’ meaning that the President has to make the decisions and accept the ultimate responsibility. There was no one else he could blame, no one he could pass the buck to.
Make decisions, clean the mess if you have to, but don’t blame others if you do not have the capability or the wherewithal to lift things up. If your parents didn’t send you for higher studies, do it now! Instead of wishing you had a love marriage, bring love into your existing marriage! So stop blaming others because the buck stop with you..!
