I’m sure we’ve all heard the saying by Mother Teresa, “I’ll never attend and anti-war rally, but if you have a peace rally, invite me”. It is a poignant reminder of the need for all of us to be more focussed on being positive rather than being negative.

But these days it seems like we’re being programmed by society to be more negative. The media always needs a villain to vilify, to blame for all the ills of the modern world. There was a time when people used to say “sex sells”, these days it seems the main thing the media “sells” is the idea that whatever is going wrong in your life, it’s “not your fault”.

In our modern world we are constantly being bombarded with people telling us “It’s not our fault”. What’s not our fault, you may ask? Well EVERYTHING really. We just love hearing that it’s not OUR fault, that there’s always someone else to blame for everything and absolve us of all responsibility. I once had a sales manager that told me that the key to selling was to tell people that “It’s not their fault”. When I asked what exactly was not their fault he replied, who cares, tell them the JFK assassination is not their fault and they’ll love you and they’ll buy from you.

The Problem…

The real problem that this creates today is that everyone is busy dodging responsibility by blaming everyone else for everything under the sun, that inevitably we end up with scapegoats upon whom most of the blame ends up falling, invariably without any real reason or justification.

When the GFC struck, anyone in a suit was treated as a scapegoat for all the world’s financial woes, anything that the media thinks could plausibly be considered as a “terrorist attack” (in spite of the fact it may have nothing to do with terrorism) is instantly blamed on every Muslim person.

We do this because as long as it’s someone else’s fault, then it’s not our fault! But what about the victims of the scapegoating? What effects does it have on ordinary everyday people who are just trying to live their lives, but end up being blamed for things that have nothing to do with them?

The White Shirt Society

Enter, The White Shirt Society! The White Shirt Society is the answer to the modern plague of scapegoating. The White Shirt Society is a secret society that has been around since the beginning of time. They are single handedly responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, the fall of Pompeii, the Fire of London, the JFK assassination, 9/11 and perhaps most disturbingly the rise of Justin Bieber. Yet in spite of the devastation they have wrought, not one member of The White Shirt Society has ever been called to account for their actions.

The reason for this, well… they don’t actually exist. They’re a figment of my imagination. Given the non-existential nature of The White Shirt Society, they make the perfect scapegoats. They can be blamed for everything and they’ll never feel victimised, marginalised, depressed, angry or sue for defamation.

It is also easy to feed the media’s insatiable appetite for vilification of minority groups and garner support from the general public for widespread condemnation of The White Shirt Society, thus saving other minorities from the unjustified racism that currently befalls them.

This kind of psychology was evidenced recently in a US survey…

“A cheeky poll conducted in the United States by Public Policy Polling has found a surprisingly high level of support — particularly among Republican voters — for taking military action against a place called Agrabah.

If the name of the city sounds familiar, it may be that you’re a fan of Disney films because Agrabah is the fictional home of Aladdin.”

If we were to conduct a survey about the White Shirt Society we would probably find amongst other things that they were unhygienic, ungrateful people who refused to give up their seat on the bus, dodged on their taxes and not a single member had taken part in the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Since reports emerged yesterday which suggested that The White Shirt Society HQ may be sitting on vast oil reserves, The White House this morning announced that it had found irrefutable evidence that The White Shirt Society was harbouring members of ISIS, stockpiling Weapons of Mass Destruction and generally supporting the spread of Communism.

So join me in saying enough is enough, let’s stop the vilification of innocent stereotypes and instead blame EVERYTHING on The White Shirt Society. We’ll organise online petitions through change.org, stage mass protest rallies and subject them to be constantly “randomly selected” for additional screening at airports. And you know what, the world will be a happier place!