There are things more important than a lunar eclipse. Unless you happen to be a five-year-old whose favorite activities are visiting the Air and Space Museum and checking the paper each day for the times that the sun, moon and all visible planets rise and set in the sky. Then a lunar eclipse is just about the most important thing going.

Unfortunately, a bank of clouds north of the Beltway kept us from getting a glimpse of the red moon. In fact, I didn't see the moon at all until about midnight, though I must admit I didn't look for it after Max went to sleep a little before eight.

He didn't complain--much. He was disappointed, almost bitterly so. But he was really too tired to complain about it, and anyway, it wasn't my fault. You can't control the weather.

I've learned that culpability is very important to young people. Or, at least, it is to Max and his friends. If you can convince them that matters are out of your (and their) hands, the problem tends to go away. If there's something, rather than someone, to blame, it's somehow easier.

As we get older, that tends to change. Or maybe it's that adults find it easier to rationalize the immutable into the mutable. If the clutch goes out on my car, it's much easier to blame my wife (say, for her inept handling footwork) than the fact that the clutch is 15 years old. Of course, the implement in question is a hydraulic Honda clutch and shows no sign of slipping, and Barbara would never dream of driving my car except in direst emergency; I used that potential case just as an example. The point is, it's always easier to blame people than, say, the unknowable.

Take Iraq. A lot of folks like to pin all the problems there on the Prez and his pals. I've done that from time to time myself. But it's also possible that everything that happened there is just a freakish bit of dumb luck, and that if one or two things had gone the other way, we'd be sipping sweet Iraqi crude and gas would be a buck a gallon.

Maybe that's not the best example.

Sometimes airplanes just crash. There's no design flaw, no skipped bit of maintenance or improperly-stored oxygen canisters. No pilot error, no terrorists, no rivets missing on the wing. Sometimes the wind blows a certain (highly unexpected) way and the plane goes down. When you read the comments of the family and friends of those who died, even after a finding of wind shear or microbrust as the cause, they tend to separate into "It was God's will" or "People make mistakes." As in people failed to predict that the wind would act a certain way. I'm not even touching the God's will stuff, except to say that it's another way for people to find a cause that somehow is personal rather than random.

I understand this. And I understand why adults want to find human-related causes for just about everything. As children, we tend to see things in black and white. As adults, we tend to see things more in shades of gray. So as a child, a problem is either caused by a specific person or it's caused by something we can't control. As an adult, we realize that there are plenty of problems that are caused by both other people (or ourselves) and things we can't control, but we tend to want to explain them solely in the "it was his (or her) fault." If there's a problem, we want to be able to correct it. But if the cause is outside of our control, then we can't. We feel helpless.

Children feel helpless all the time. They rely on their parents and scores of other adults to help them. Adults are supposed to be able to get through life on their own. This is a complete crock of shit, of course, but more people than you might think believe it. And so a lot of us get nervous when things happen that we can't do anything about. Like losing a red moon sighting to storm clouds in the north.

I comforted Max with the fact that lunar eclipses happen fairly frequently. Now, if he were to miss a complete solar eclipse because of bad weather, I'm not sure he would be so sanguine. But then, by the time that happens, he'll be older. And he'll blame it on me. And feel much better.

Jon Worley blames the Prez for the global warming that caused the storm that blocked out his (and Max's) view of the lunar eclipse.