CURRENT AFFAIRS: Individual Responsibility

This might also come under the heading of Education, Self-Analysis, Literature, Writing, etc. and it touches strongly on politics—my favorite topic (!).

From Jerz’s Literacy Log, to The Tribune Review, this article, Woman Sues Bar, has had me spending a good portion of the morning in research. This is where Education comes in, and the Great Lettuce Head who wondered about the contemporary necessity of English Composition methods.

Nothing will get my dander up as much as individual responsibility and our current tendency to point fingers at each other rather than ourselves.

And this perhaps, oversimplified and generalized, is where I lean towards more conservative values of straightforward laws that should be a guideline for all, rather than amending, adding, and clarifying to conform to the individual’s rights as is the more liberal take on freedom of expression. Instead of making another new law about how fast a repair must be made to a chipped step, I’d sympathize with the one poor soul in a thousand who wasn’t watching where he was walking, but that would be about it. I’m also willing to stand up to my own inadequacies:

Why didn’t I go to college after high school? I screwed up.
Why didn’t I pursue one of my more potentially promising talents? I screwed up.
Why didn’t I spend more time working in the frameshop the past couple years? I screwed up.
Why didn’t I drink my milk and eat breakfast the last fifty years? I screwed up.
Why did I start smoking at age twenty-three? I screwed up.
Why did I invest all so late in the stock market? I screwed up.
Why did I spend six years living with that other man? I screwed up!

(There’s lots more, but that’s all you’re getting for now; I think it’s enough to prove my point.)

In researching the dram shop laws that cover bars serving “visually intoxicated patrons” I find it too time-consuming to delve deep enough to come up with the exact clarification of how one determines this. Unfortunately, this precludes my intention to rant about individual responsibility because I cannot back it with full facts and am sure that while it seems ridiculous on the surface to hold bartenders responsible for guessing a patron’s individual alcohol tolerance, I am also reluctant to propose any legislation to apply a two-drink maximum or any other such silly law. It would prove nothing and not help the problem anyway. But it does make one wonder why a bartender is supposed to know when an individual is drunk any more than a policeman who can only guess and then must depend on experience (as the bartender) to then establish intoxication by one or two on-site testings, and a breathalyzer or urine test at the station if warranted.

Back to politics. Don’t blame Bush, or Clinton or any other president for that matter. His cabinet, his House and Senate, his advisors, his people—yes, you and I who either voted or didn’t do enough to get others to vote—are all to be held accountable if we allow the pattern of responsibility as both blanket and fence to be applied to all aspects of our lives, rather than just a select few areas.

Is this what we want?