Making Good Excuses Goes A Long Way Today

Ray Recchi

[Editor�s Note: This is a reprint from Lifestyle Columnist Ray Recchi in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel from about 1985. I found it in one of my old coaching notebooks. The examples are a bit dated and the tone is quite cynical but it�s a good message for us adults as we endeavor to build responsibility in our children. Ray worked at the Sun-Sentinel for over 30 years and passed away from cancer in 1999. I found his columns often to be good coaching and parenting advice. G.Edson]

In my father's house, there was no such thing as a "good excuse." You either did what you were supposed to do or faced the consequences. As a matter of fact, if you did try to wimp out by claiming ''extenuating circumstances," you would get his "I don't want to hear any excuses " lecture on top of the punishment for your transgression. Dad simply refused to accept excuses, wouldn't even listen to them. "If you have a problem with a teacher," he used to tell me, "I don't want to hear your side of it because you're wrong, and the teacher is right."

A little harsh, I�ll grant you, but he did it to teach me to accept responsibility and take the consequences for my own actions in a world that he knew could often be unfair and unforgiving. Dad couldn't have foreseen that such training would be unnecessary because of changes that would take place in the world. How could he have known that I would live most of my life in a world in which excuses would overwhelmingly outnumber apologies and consequences? Heck, you can get away with murder If you have a good excuse. Sometimes, even a bad excuse will do. No one, it seems, is guilty of anything anymore.

Shooting Down Old Ethics

In years gone by, for example, a person such as Bernhard Goetz, who emptied a gun into four people on a public subway, would be punished by the law, unless his targets were shooting at him. The public, too, would have been outraged, not only because he shot four men who didn�t even have guns but because he had endangered so many other lives.

These days, however, it�s apparently OK to do that sort of thing if you have a good excuse. Goetz�s excuse, for example, was that he thought those four guys were going to rob him. So he pulled out the gun he just happened to be (illegally) carrying and mowed them down. The jury apparently figured that the fact that he was probably right in thinking he was about to be robbed didn�t mitigate the possibility that he might have been wrong. So they acquitted him, except on the illegal weapons charge, saying, in effect, that he shouldn�t have been carrying the gun but that, as long as he had it, it was OK to fire at will.

Of course, they might not have been as forgiving if Goetz had been unlucky enough to have accidentally shot an innocent mother of three or an honor student on his way to school. The Goetz case, however, is not an isolated example of this sort of thing. High-ranking officials in the Reagan administration, for example, obviously broke the law of the land and disregarded the will of Congress, and the people of the United States in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Teach Your Children Well

They, too, had a good excuse, however. Being more intelligent than the majority of the people or the Congress, they had to break the law to save us from ourselves. Of course, these patriotic souls didn�t say the rest of us were too stupid to understand the issues involved. They merely claimed their hearts and minds were in the right place so they shouldn�t be held accountable. So, of course, they will get away with it.

So Modern Parents such as myself have to see the light and stop telling our children to swallow their excuses. Those who step forward and accept responsibility, after all, are looked upon as stupid. If we truly want to prepare our children to survive and flourish in this world, we should instead be teaching them how to come up with an excuse when they mess up.

And there are plenty of excuses out there that are almost guaranteed to effectively keep anyone from accepting the consequences for their actions. These include sugar imbalances, a whole battery of syndromes, battle fatigue, temporary insanity, drug flashbacks, traffic and a bad day at the office. Despite my early training, even I have learned to rely on excuses. When I turned in my column a half hour late yesterday, for example, I told my boss that I wasn�t really guilty of missing my deadline. I would have turned it in on time, I explained, except it wasn�t done yet.