Responsibility "R" Us

In his speech last night President Obama used the term "responsibility" quite a few times. I hope it is a sign of a reversal in a decades long national trend toward evasion of responsibility, but I am not optimistic. The reason I am not optimistic is the fundamental structure of our society and culture in 2009. We have turned safety nets into entitlements, and our legal system has allowed countless individuals and groups to use it as a giant blank canvas on which to throw various convoluted legal theories about blame and someone else's responsibility, hoping some of it will stick.

All of this has been done in search of the money, not the truth, and some of it has stuck. That is how we get warning labels on refrigerators that tell us not to stick our head into the freezer and shut the door. That is why a box of food I recently bought warned me to only eat the contents, not the packaging. That is why we are inundated with commercials urging us to purchase some new, allegedly helpful medication, then warned it may cause death, dismemberment, temporary insanity, loss of all friendships, and horrific alterations to just about every bodily function (apparently the latter two are related consequences).

I even saw a billboard on the highway for a new website that helps you find someone or some company to sue, even if you aren't aware that you've been wronged. The message? There must be something that you're not happy about, and if you are not happy, there must be someone else responsible for that lack of happiness. Apparently our founding documents have been changed to read that everyone has an inalienable right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of money damages from anyone who we can convince a jury has made us unhappy'.

This is also the culture that has produced 'helicopter' parents; so named because they hover over their children's lives in an overprotective frenzy. These parents do not merely support their children, they place themselves between their children and the world, doing their homework, helping them avoid any negative consequences, writing their college essays, showing up at admissions interviews, arguing with teachers and professors over grades, and, in some recent instances, actually showing up at job interviews with their children.

We all know that children watch what we do; they do not necessarily listen to what we say. We also know that they are imitators. For many centuries, the learning community of a multi-generational family was the major source of wisdom for most children and there were daily lessons and examples of responsibility. Even as families began to move apart, two world wars surrounding a great depression provided ample opportunities to witness and take on personal responsibility. A consumer society coupled with instanteneous technological gratification (I still remember making sure I had enough cash for the weekend before ATMs) now continually lessens the opportunities to develop responsibility, while time and money pressures entice us to find someone else to be responsible.

Our children are watching and learning. As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." All of us as parents and educators must be responsible for acting responsibly and teaching our children to do the same. I checked the website from the billboard, and I still couldn't find anyone else to sue to make it happen.