In 1976 three men kidnapped a bus full of children (26) along with the bus driver. After driving around for more than 11 hours they kids and the driver were forced into a tracker trailer van and buried underground. Eventually the bus driver and some of the older boys managed climb up through a metal lid lid in the ceiling (held down with hundreds of pounds of batteries. Sixteen hours later the driver and all the children emerged from the van, but they never managed to leave the incident behind them.
If you look in wikipedia for “1976 Chowchilla kidnapping” you can find some of the details of this unfortunate incident. However, you won’t find reference to the study outlined in this blog. About a year after the kidnapping a group of psychologist interviewed the children. In the interviews on of the questions the children were asked was something along the lines of “Tell me in your own words why this happened.”
Every child had a unique very personal reason for why the kidnapping occurred. The reasons were things such as:
- “I yelled at my Mom.”
- “I didn’t do my homework.”
- “I missed Sunday School.”
All of the reasons were personal, related to events happening in the children’s lives. Most of the reasons related to things the children felt guilty about. But, some of the reasons were just coincidental events happening in their lives — not necessarily ones to be guilty about.
If the District Attorney was asked why this happened the answer would be something along the lines of “The three kidnappers just lost $30,000 in a real estate deal and were doing the kidnapping for money, oh and they were sociopaths incapable or unwilling to empathize with the 26 terrorized children.”
The real why of this situation may be closely related to the DAs assessment, or it may be something entirely different. We won’t know. The factors contributing to events such as this are plain and simple AND complex at the same time.
But, that is not the point of the blog. The point I wanted to post for your consideration is the fact that each of the 26 children generated a “reason” that was personal and immediate to them.
This is not unique to children. As adults we often do the same. After a significant episode we scan events leading up to it and select one or more of those events as the “reason” to explain the significant episode.
We may be correct, or we may be wrong. It is not the correctness or wrongness that is being pointed out. It is the simple fact that we do this. It is an automatic response to significant episodes. We rush to assign blame or reasons to events.
More often than not this rush to assign reasons is a bad idea — a bad idea for many reasons. We typically select a reason that supports our sense of guilt and our on-going certainty that we are worthless no-good-niks. Well that sucks as a strategy. Always seeing yourself as the chump that caused the problem is just as misguided as the idiot that never sees the mote (or plank) in their own eye.
The point to this blog is not to give you yet another example confirming how exactly you are worthless and stupid. The idea of the blog was to point out the simple fact that we do have a strong tendency to latch onto an explanation of significant events.
Nature may abhor a vacuum. We seem to abhor the lacking of an explanation. And, we seem to be more than willing to substitute any superstition or apparently related event as the cause.