Personal Responsibility Takes a Back Seat in America, No One is to Blame for Anything

Personal responsibility takes a back seat in America and no one, including our elected officials and high-level administration figures, is to blame for anything.

We are living in a country in which personal responsibility takes a back seat. No one wants to accept responsibility for the things that have gone terribly wrong in this country, whether it's of a personal nature, or a public one, but they all line up to take credit for anything good that occurs. According to Frank Rich's op-ed article in the New York Times, Alan Greenspan, who testified on Capitol Hill last week, said, “I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time.” As you know, Greenspan served as the Fed chairman for 18 years and his Mensa-like qualities were out to lunch when Wall Street literally imploded. No acceptance of his role in this quagmire, but that's okay. It's the American way. Greenspan was only too eager to paint himself as an innocent bystander, which is furthest from the truth. The reality is as Fed chairman, the buck stopped with him and he should not have missed this "bubble." He groveled for an explanation as to why the bottom fell out of the bucket -- he dated it back to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Really?

This "not my fault" syndrome also has roots in other sectors of our society. Even the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI are blaming the media, the anti-Catholic fringe and "petty gossip" as a crutch for justifying the decades-long deliberate failure of the church to stem the widespread culture of child molestation within its ranks. I remember as a child attending Mt. Alvernia High School, an all-girls Catholic school, in Montego Bay, Jamaica, there were always rumors floating around that the priests were engaging in sexual activities with some of the students. There was a priest, Father Pegg, who had a history of sexual misconduct with students and even managed to get a student pregnant. He was not punished. He died in a terrible car accident, which I considered God's way of punishing him for his despicable deeds. Of course, the Vatican and others would rather say it has a public relations problem and not a pedophilia problem.

New York's ineffective and pathetic Gov. David Paterson, would rather remove himself from accepting personal responsibility for the mess in his state and instead blame President Obama and interject the color of his skin as the reason why he can't get anything done in his state. In the same vein as Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), he would rather lay blame at the feet of a newspaper, rather than taking personal responsibility for his current position.

No-one from the Bush administration has had the decency to take any responsibility for anything untoward that happened under his watch, such as the selling of selling faulty intelligence products without exerting proper due diligence, as Rich states. No, Dick Cheney would rather get on television and trash President Obama rather than taking any personal responsibility for his role in many unsavory aspects of the administration. For what it is worth, President Obama, during his inaugural address called for “a new era of responsibility,” which he lived up to in the early days of his administration, but as it stands today, he's less than forceful in that regard. Mr. President, the reality is that Main Street is waiting on you to help us recover from the economic nightmare we find ourselves in. Wall Street didn't put you in office, we the people did and our hopes in you are fading fast.

Read more:  No One Is to Blame for Anything | Frank Rich, NY Times

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