Hillary Clinton has accused Barak Obama of plagiarism — including that now-infamous “change you can Xerox” line. He re-used some of a speech by his friend, Deval Patrick, with his permission.

We are a culture that praises original thought and fresh ideas. America is the place where you make something of yourself, and the ideal of self-resiliency is pervasive.

But the thing is, everyone steals. All of our ideas inevitably come from someplace else.

We can’t help it. It’s just how the mind works. Our brains absorb massive amounts of information automatically every day, mostly without consciously processing it. (For more on this, look up Robert Heath’s theory of low involvement processing. Definition of the theory here, and here’s an interview with Heath on the subject.)

There was a funny little video from a couple years ago that illustrates the point, from an advertising point of view:

This isn’t a new phenomenon — I’m sure our brains have worked like this forever. But technology has made information more accessible, perhaps, and thus made it more apparent. Blogging in particular creates a more tangible record of our sources of inspiration. (If we are diligent about sticking links in there.)

Let’s just all acknowledge that we’re bound to steal or plagiarize, for pretty much everything we do. (There’s a reason that Faris’s blog is called “Talent Imitates, Genius Steals.”) Let it go. We just have to be more diligent about attributing sources — if we can think of them.

Taking it one step further, Bob Garfield on his show On the Media suggested recently that maybe it’s more about time and place than it is about content.  He gives the “I have a dream” speech as an example:

Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech for the 1963 March on Washington made no splash whatsoever when he delivered it in Detroit two months earlier. Yet on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he held the crowd – and the world – in his thrall, a quarter of a million mesmerized marchers blissfully uninterested in who wrote what when.

In the end, I’m not trying to make a political statement here — the Clinton/Obama dispute just set my brain in motion.  But let the plagiarism thing drop, will you?  We all do it.  Let’s just admit it and move on.  Instead, why don’t take a page from Garfield and concentrate a little more on giving the right context to the pilfered words coming out of our mouths.