On Responsibility

When something goes wrong in Lex jr.’s sheltered life, he will immediately determine who is responsible, and it’s truly a Ripley’s moment when the responsibility falls back on him. The cause of a dropped ball is almost always because it wasn’t thrown correctly to him. A fall on his bike is the result of the uneven pavement not his inattention. But heck, he’s only eight years old and most adults have trouble with words like, “Oops, I’m sorry, that was my fault. Let me help fix what I screwed up.”

This whole thing worries me because we live in a society that increasingly attributes every failure to someone or something other than individual stupidity or lack of discipline. Mom and Dad both passed away, after long productive lives, from the ravages of a two pack-a-day smoking habit. Both quit late in life, when it was too late, after smoking related illnesses laid bare the facts that they were killing themselves with cigarettes. They never complained of their early decision to take up the habit. When the bright guys with the federal government decided that warnings were necessary on cigarette packs, Dad laughed, “Hell they’ve been calling them coffin nails since I was a kid. How much more of a warning do you need?” Deep down I think they enjoyed smoking and thought that something else would get them before cancer. So Mom and Dad never joined any class action suite against the tobacco companies. They accepted the responsibility of their choices and lived happy lives.

Today, society doles out blame for everything usually to large companies or the federal government and hardly ever to an individual – unless it’s the MSM tagging a Republican president. A guy 300 lbs overweight, who eats three Big Macs a day, has a six pack with dinner, smokes a carton of cigarettes a week, and dies while taking Fhen Fhen has hit the jackpot for his next of kin. The family will sue McDonald’s, beer, cigarette, and drug makers and never have to explain the descendants own gluttonous behavior. Every personal weakness is dubbed a syndrome or disease and the afflicted person becomes a victim. Not a victim of their own weakness, stupidity or sloth but a victim of the nearest proximate large corporation or if none exists, the federal government.

Look at the 34 poor soles trapped in the nursing home in New Orleans. Some dopey inbred looking parish president – proof positive these people should not control a dime of the federal money headed to LA - gets on TV and blames the slow federal response for their deaths. Then it turns out they all died on the first day of the storm. Hmm, Boudreaux we’ve got a problem. It looks as if you’re either an idiot or a liar. My bet is he’s equal parts of both. Then the relatives get on TV, all high and dry somewhere, blaming everyone but themselves for Mom’s death. “Why, hell we can’t be held responsible for Mom’s death. We were paying them. Sure we could have picked her up on the way out of town, but then we’d have had to listen to her go on and on about how she met Dad and how much she missed him. Besides, if we picked her up, we wouldn’t have had room for the dog kennel.” That whole episode reminded me of the Dolly Parton movie where she says, “Mamma can take care of six kids, but six kids can’t take care of Mamma.” It’s just easier to blame someone after the fact than take some action before hand. Besides, how hard is it to get out of the way of an object moving at 12 miles and hour with a week’s notice?

Don’t even think it! The people who ran that home and skipped town to save themselves are weasels. But at the end of the day, they didn’t leave their mother behind to drown.