Latin class in high school, many decades ago now. Not sure I remember which Latin scholar said it, I want to say Seneca, but it’s been a long time and that may not be correct. If I trusted search engines more these days I would look it up, but my faith in getting a correct answer has diminished in the last few years. But that’s another story.

But it’s not my fault! We loved the translation back in Latin class, it made us laugh. Such was our naiveté. We thought only teenagers used that expression. Little did we know that adults made use of it far more than we adolescents every dreamed of. How nice to be able to go through life not acknowledging that our actions have consequences, and accepting that we are responsible for the actions we take.

Recently in Sunday school class, our pastor was leading a discussion on race relations in our Southern state. (this was pre-pandemic, we are gathering online these days). One of the church members made the comment that he had worked in real estate right after college, he is retirement age now, and he remembered a client telling him that when she and her husband bought their house they had to decide between the house they lived in now and one, at the same price, in a neighborhood across town. Her house now was worth slightly more than what she paid for it, while the house across town, the one she made the decision not to buy, was worth several times the original purchase price, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Her neighborhood had become mostly black, while the other was almost exclusively white. I felt compelled to point out that what was really important about that fact, aside from the loss of value of the investment, was that in the United States, property taxes fund education. So the schools in that area have a meagre amount to spend on their schools, while the schools in the upper class neighborhood have money for every amenity. What shocked me about this SS class was that the member who brought up the subject of real estate, said he had never thought about the disparity in the school systems.

Sed non culpa mea est. Is it really not our fault that a zip code determines what kind of education a child receives? I suspect it really is all of our faults and until we are willing to admit that we have participated in systemic racism we are unlikely to change it.