It’s always nice to have a scapegoat. You know, someone you can blame if you don’t want to do something or didn’t do something the way someone wanted you to. I’ve always been a terrible liar, and even little white lies about who’s to blame for a certain situation never came easy to me, but now that I work at The Evening Sun, I can have a scapegoat for any situation without even trying.
In high school, my mother was always the scapegoat, and she was perfectly willing to fill that role. If I didn’t want to go to a party in the middle of someone’s corn field in November or if I really didn’t want to go to the movies with that creepy, but very nice, kid from homeroom, I would always just blame my mom. “That sucks,” I would say. “I really wanted to go to that freezing cold corn field and stay for several hours, but Mom said I can’t go.”
When I thought my friends might be catching on, I even had fake telephone conversations with my mother, during which I would plead my case for the benefit of whoever was in the room with me.
Now that I’m a little older, I have much less need for that particular kind of scapegoat. First of all, my friends and I are all now old enough to drink beer inside, but I’ve also discovered that the world won’t end if I tell someone I don’t want to do something.
Having reached that decision several years ago, I didn’t really think I would need to play this particular blame game again, but I was wrong.
Ever since I started working at the newspaper, I have heard people discuss what goes on here, and after conversations with several individuals, I discovered that I had a scapegoat that I didn’t even need to make up, because someone already did it for me.
I can’t count the number of times people have told me they know about the inner-workings here at the newspaper, and how I’m being silenced by my boss. If someone gives me a tip that doesn’t amount to much or if an explanation makes something seem less important than it originally appeared, the blame immediately falls on the head of the almighty editor. I could argue and offer explanations until I’m blue in the face, but it would do no good, because they already “know” how it works.
So now that you’ve read this, you have two options, you can believe that the higher-ups here at the paper let me write about what I want, or you can assume that they’ve forced me to say all of this, so they won’t hold the blame. The choice is yours.