Steve Fey's Live From Las Vegas!

I read a lot about personal responsibility, and have been seeing a lot about it for years. The conservative movement started out saying it was all in favor of personal responsibility; those damned liberals were all about tax and spend to solve problems. Remember? I see snide remarks about it, little jokes, such as the one I saw in a humor mailing I received yesterday, where the tag line for a story about health in Britain was to the effect that, if it required personal responsibility, they were all going to die. Politicians, pundits, TV commentators, the guy in line at the supermarket all like that phrase, “personal responsibility.”

Now I can’t claim to be any kind of a Christian, because I’m no way going to do what Jesus said to do and give everything away to the poor. I’m not nuts about visiting people in prison, either, and tending the sick is best left to professionals. But one thing Mr. Nazareth said seems to me to be pretty germane to this topic. That is that you should take the beam out of your own eye before complaining about the mote in your neighbor’s. True, that does seem to argue for ‘personal responsibility’ but it also argues for tending to your own issues and letting other people tend to theirs. The fact is, there are reasons for things like income tax, and welfare, and other things that those who whine most about ‘personal responsibility’ claim to hate. For example, income tax keeps the gap between rich and poor from getting so big that the poor see nothing wrong with simply taking it from the rich at gunpoint. Let’s see, has there been an increase in crime lately? Hmmm. And welfare keeps the streets from being impassible due to the tragically poor clogging them up by sleeping in them and begging on every corner. Is there a homeless problem where you live these days? Hmmm.

Well, maybe if everyone could be responsible for their own welfare things would be better. In fact, I’m sure they would. Things would be better if people signaled lane changes, stopped for red lights, and didn’t speed through school zones, too. It seems to come back to some sort of Idealist vision of reality combined with a healthy dose of fear about the future that leads someone to start spouting about “personal responsibility.” I’ve ranted about those topics before, if you’d care to search this blog for the postings. Now I’ll just assume that you’ve read them and say something like, ‘well well, events seem to be developing the way my theory would predict. Hmmm.’ Okay, so I won’t do that. But I do wish that the personal responsibility crowd would take a hint from me, if they don’t like Jesus, and for Pete’s sake, take their own advice.

Labels: Politics

# posted by Steve @ 15:16