Personal Responsibility in the Land of Not My Fault
A comment made by arr_squared in response to my last column got me thinking on this subject and an anecdote from my time at the University of Georgia. I was taking Honors Introduction to Political Science with Professor Russell (who was a local lawyer and the nephew of fmr. Senator Richard B. Russell). During the course of discussion in the class, the subject of helmet laws came up.
I have been for a long while a firm believer that helmet laws should not exist for motorcycle riders. I took this position in class and Prof. Russell came back at me with a simple question: what do you do if the person has an accident with no helmet on, ends up in the hospital, and has no insurance or other way to cover his expenses? When he first asked this, it stumped me and I sat there a bit like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck. After all, it’s one thing to take a position of that nature in a vacuum, but you suddenly add in the repercussions from those actions into the equations and it makes it a bit more difficult. Seeing my quandary, he told me to think about it for the rest of class as he moved on with the discussion.
At the end of the class on my way out, I stopped to talk to Prof. Russell and told him that if that happened, then you let the rider die as he made the decision to ride without a helmet and it was his responsibility to deal with the repercussions of his decision. He just smiled, nodded, and noted that it wasn’t as easy to make the decision when you threw in factors of that nature into it. He didn’t criticize my decision and position, but he did make the comment that maintaining a position through its logical conclusion was important and never easy.
Over the years since then, I’ve watched the slow slide of Western Civilization into a place where far too many people believe they are not responsible for the consequences of their actions. They believe they can do anything they want, and someone else will make it all better when it falls down around their heads. When you’re a small child, it’s expected that mom and dad will make things better. When you’re adult, you should still be living your life with that same belief. Unfortunately, far too many people do that—substituting the Government for mom and dad.
I look at a number of things in my life that aren’t the way I’d like them to be. Be they my finances, my health, my job situation, or the like, there’s only one person that I can blame for them and expect to fix them: me. Too many people in society today, however, do not see it as their responsibility to correct their own situation or see that they have to accept responsibility for being there in the first place.
In many cases, it becomes a situation of people wanting the easy way out. They want someone else to clean up after their mistakes. When they get in over their heads in debt, they want to be able to wipe their hands of it and move on. When they get close to retirement, they want the Government to have taken care of their retirement needs. When they get a fat ass from eating too many Big Macs, they want to be able to sue McDonalds. There are far too few people in this country now who are willing to own up to the repercussions from their own choices and deal with the consequences. Between Government School bringing up a new generation where legitimate self-esteem is cheapened and students aren’t forced to deal with failure to the plethora of external things on which adults are able to pin their troubles to keep from having to pin it on themselves, this civilization is tipping the slippery slope more and more toward the vertical.
I’m currently in the midst of my annual re-reading of Atlas Shrugged, and it’s showing me again the worst case scenario destination of this type of thought process. Despairingly, however, the cries of ‘It’s not my fault’ and ‘You take care of it’ in the novel resonate more and more each year with what is actually happening in the real world. I would ask the direction to Galt’s Gulch, but I fear I may be more of an Eddie Willers than a Hank Rearden.
© Clint Hauser, 2005