Sunday, March 09, 2008

Personal Responsibility. What happened to it?


The LA Times article I was going to link to is now dead. So I'll just report. This woman (I shudder to call her that... more like 2 year old child caught in a woman's body), Arelia Margarita Taveras, a well known attorney and media comentator, lost a fortune sitting her dumb ass in a casino gambling away here savings. 1 Million dollars at a craps table! She says it's the casino's fault! They should have stopped her! This blows my mind. I'd like to think she hasn't a chance in hell of winning this ridiculous law suit but I can't put such misguided confidence in our screwed up judicial system. It's happened before. We sue gun manufacturers because a predator used their product to kill someone. We sue Mc Donald's for making us fat. We sue cigarette manufacturers because we smoked their products till our lungs turned black. We sue car manufacturers because we drove reckless and killed our loved one. Where does it end?

We have become a pathetic society of slackers. How did we get here? No one is responsible for their actions anymore. A person can murder someone in cold blood and somehow, inevitably wind up usurping their prey and becoming the victim. It's never the perpetrator's fault. They're just "products of their environment", or "victims of circumstance". "The deck was stacked against them", or "they didn't get a fair shake". "They were poor" or "they were abused". Anything to shift the blame from the person who's screwed up to anyone/everyone else. The bleeding hearts say things like, "We failed them as a society", or "We should have noticed something was wrong and gotten them help...we missed the signs". Well guess what? IT AIN'T MY FRIGGIN' JOB TO GET YOU HELP!

We have moved from a respectable country of hard working people who loved liberty enough to embrace it wholesale and be responsible for their own successes, their own failures and their own destinies to a nation of whining, spineless, finger pointing ingrates who don't know the meaning of honor or integrity, the concept of pride in a hard days work, stuffing money in a sock drawer for a rainy day or, God forbid, earning what we have and being just a little bit embarrassed to sit with our hand out waiting to get fed! Instead we have evolved into a self destructive group of lemmings willing to continue to write ourselves generous checks from the public coffers until we're damned near bankrupt for various "social programs" that serve to encourage people from earning their keep rather than providing them with an incentive to do so.

Personal Responsibility. How did that become a bad idea? Stop the planet... I'd like to exit now.