When some calamity occurs, there’s that immediate urge to assign blame, to get it off of you and onto someone else. That is the first feeling that emerges. And it’s so easy to give into that.
If you’ve been in enough situations like this, you eventually realize that the blame game is a waste of time. The task at hand is solving the problem, the new reality.
Yes, we could have avoided this if only…
I told you that…
This wasn’t my responsibility…
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the blame game, but it takes maturity to see how useless that is and focus on the new task at hand, as Joan does here.
CHARLES
Duke of Alencon, this was your default,
That, being captain of the watch to-night,
Did look no better to that weighty charge.
ALENCON
Had all your quarters been as safely kept
As that whereof I had the government,
We had not been thus shamefully surprised.
BASTARD OF ORLEANS
Mine was secure.
REIGNIER
And so was mine, my lord.
CHARLES
And, for myself, most part of all this night,
Within her quarter and mine own precinct
I was employ’d in passing to and fro,
About relieving of the sentinels:
Then how or which way should they first break in?
JOAN LA PUCELLE
Question, my lords, no further of the case,
How or which way: ’tis sure they found some place
But weakly guarded, where the breach was made.
And now there rests no other shift but this;
To gather our soldiers, scatter’d and dispersed,
And lay new platforms to endamage them.
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