Welcome to the Accusation Nation.

What if the root of the government shutdown lies not with bad politicians, with our society’s obsession with finding fault?

Blame.

It stifles solidarity. Quashes collaboration. Precludes progress. Negates negotiation.

Blame is the antithesis of hope.

All the while, a political stalemate has caused Washington D.C. to grind to a halt — bipartisan dysfunction only exacerbated by fault finding, naysaying and petty smear tactics. Lines were drawn in the sand, and no one is moving a muscle…other than their pointer fingers.

In this sad state of affairs, we’ve become an accusation nation.

But you already knew that. There is widespread outrage amongst both pundits and the populace: fury and disgust that our elected officials have thrown cooperation to the wind. Instead, Washington has become a chasm of hardline stances, which no bridge currently spans. Modesto Bee columnist Michael Eggman calls the government shutdown “childish”. Marshall University professor Joseph Wyatt likens the ongoing stalemate to “tantrums”. Hundreds of Americans tweeted their dismay to HLN — many saying our politicians have “let us down” and that they’ve “lost faith in the government”.

With Congress’ approval ratings scraping the bottom at 5%, it’s clear that this sentiment is nearly universal: we blame Washington.

Yet, all this does is add another layer of vitriol into the mix — voicing our outrage at the blamers at Capitol Hill by turning around and blaming them, too. It’s a hopelessly doomed crossfire of fault finding, finger pointing and question begging that ups the rhetoric but leaves the underlying issues in their sad, broken state.

If blame is indeed the antithesis of hope, we’re on the path to hopelessness.

The media is quick to cash in on this polarity by focusing on that very division and debacle. NBC, the Associated Press, CNN and a bevy of other news organizations have each commissioned proprietary polls to millions of Americans — not to solicit solutions, but to determine who is to blame. As this worthless information is garnered, the partisan war machine — composed of pundits, PACs and other political heatseekers — fuels up for a continued stalemate.

There is enough blame to go around for Capitol Hill…but what of us as a nation? Politicians are a particularly slimy species, to be sure, and they are usually our scapegoats of choice — but can’t we, too, be implicated?

I am not making the tawdry argument that we are at fault because we elected these officials. But perhaps we need a good, hard look in the mirror, considering how divisive issues like Affordable Health Care, immigration and tax reform are for ourselves. As Washington argues about these issues at boardroom tables, so too do we shout about them across kitchen tables.

Boston Globe writer Michael Kranish astutely asserts that as much as we despise controversy-mongers like Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow, our collective furor and antagonism mirrors their own. It’s a simple phenomenon known as polarity — in times of division, likeminded people are magnetically attracted to each other, spiraling downward onto more extreme — and sometimes violent — trajectories. The Sun News writer Cass Sunstein aptly coined this an “echo chamber”. Inside of it, all we hear is static — white noise — when we sorely need clarity and conversation.

We shake our fists at Washington, demanding that they just cooperate and get along — yet we wrinkle our noses in disgust when we see FOX (or CNN) while flipping through the channels. We urge our elected officials to negotiate while we hold all of our issues close and keep them off the table. We call politicians “childish”, yet our own views of highly complicated legislation are often misinformed and swayed by the tides of partisan misinformation.

When cooperation is clearly the only way forward, why is it our first instinct to fault the “other side” for the impasse?

Blame is our generation’s Bubonic Plague; accusation is our Achilles’ Heal. Rhetoric — whether from politicians, pundits or We the People — only serves to turn up the heat when cooler heads must prevail.

We may hold donkeys and elephants in contempt — but all the while, we have our own elephant in the room to acknowledge.