JonahHouse.org
Title
Jonah House: resistance, community, nonviolence
Description
"No More Scapegoats!"
The kick the solider doesn't dare give his commanding officer, he may give his dog when he returns home. Or maybe he will mistreat his wife and his children without realizing that he is treating them as "scapegoats." Soldiers tried and sentenced to prison for atrocities (read torture) at Abu Ghraib are scapegoats for a whole system wedded to abuse. Arabs confined in Guantanamo - many for being in the wrong place at the wrong time - are scapegoats in our nation's effort to lay blame for the events of 9/11 on people who are discernibly different from us. It appears that even Michael Brown is a scapegoat for this administration's failure to respond to hurricane Katrina. Today illegal immigrants are being scapegoated for the inability of citizens to find any meaningful work in this country.
A scapegoat is o ne that is made to bear the blame of others. In the Hebrew Scriptures the high priest confessed the sins of his people over the head of a live goat on the Day of Atonement. The goat, bearing their sins and everything likely to poison relations among members of the community, was then driven into the wilderness. Thus the sins were expelled with the goat and the community was rid of them. We understand this ritual at first glance - and the same relationship between the ancient Jewish ritual and transferences of hostility persist in our world to this day.
The expression "scapegoat" designates (1) the victim of the ritual described above, (2) all the victims of rituals of expulsion in ancient societies, (3) all the phenomena of collective transference we observe around us. We have changed a little since the time of archaic rituals but less than we would like to believe.
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