Gatorubet;1407824; said:
While much of what you say is true, if we snatched the babies out of the cribs of the personal responsibility crowd and dropped them in homes in the hood and Appalachia, you'd get teen pregnancy humpin', welfare loving, mouth breathing social leaches in 20 years or less.
So what do we do about it other than whine that it is happening?
It took decades to hundreds of years to create the cultural environments that produce this behavior, so what is the quick fix? Personal responsibility is as much learned behavior as it is innate "character."
While it is easy to moan that a lack of personal responsibility kept most in New Orleans for Katrina, what do you do if you have no money, no car, no credit card, no way to eat once you leave home, and your disability old age pension/social security check does not come until the first of the month and they want you to flee the storm on the 28th?
Here I agree with you, but want to add that it is not so easy a fix as saying "Just do the right thing, will ya?" and shaking our head about a lack of responsible behavior when we are blessed with the upbringing, skills, example and resources to be responsible.
Well, I agree with the first part, which is why I support the front end of social programs, much as Jack Kemp does. Bad people are rarely (not never, but rarely) born, they are created. Even identical twins raised in the same womb and in the same house develop different personalities, so the enviornment one is in certainly is a major mitigating factor.
As for "whining" and development of "culture", things are more nuanced in some ways, I suppose, but not in all ways. I agree that slavery, for example, took a major toll on the black community (well, ok, duh), but I hardly think it's whining to expect people to take full responsibility for their actions in many instances. For example, no "man" or "system" made the (non-minority) fucker almost kill my wife in a car accident by bending down to fuck with his CD player and taking his eyes off the road. He did that all by his own fucking self, and he's responsible for it. So fuck him, I hope he rots and burns. Just like no one forces anyone to get behind the wheel drunk. That's a choice, and lives are at stake. It's easy to say "Well, almost everyone does it sometime, so what's the big deal" but the big deal is people get killed by it. Often. Is there an easy answer? No, but cracking down on behavior that puts lives in jeopardy, instead of letting people off with a smack on the wrist 3 or 4 times because they managed not to kill someone is a good starting point.
Now, when one talks about gang violence in the hood, more factors come into play, but the bottom line is still that people, eventually, make their own choices. There are often consequences of those choices, and they often negatively affect other people, sometimes severely. When that happens, I refuse to let people off the hook. If you buy a piece and cap somebody, or get capped in the process, that's tragic for many reasons, but then again the cappers and the cappees (not to mention the community "leaders") turn around and blame white America for the fact they are still killing each other. I am all for helping improve schools, job prospects, adult re-education, etc. in poor areas. But I don't go into their neighborhoods, sell them guns, sell them drugs, or start shooting. They do that all on their own. And the only way it will stop is if the communities step up and say enough is enough amongst themselves. For example, if we as white people are expected to have responsibility to become (and have slowly become) more "enlightened" by seeing minorities as people and not minorities, not freaking out when one moves into the neighborhood, hiring them based on qualifications, and basically giving them a chance to be people like us, as we should, then they have the responsibility to police themselves, rise up and say "enough is enough", and stop thinking guns, drugs, and rims are all that matter in life. Bottom line: we all share the responsibility.