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A think an excellent example of personal responsibility is the individual mandate. Expecting people who can afford to contribute to their healthcare costs to do so if a terrific example of personal responsibility. Wonder why some folks are against it? Too much personal responsibility?
Personal Responsibility a thing of the past?
With this class divide that is being created in this country, I wonder if Personal Responsibility has become a goal of the past. We hear of the horrid 1% truly successful individuals and how they somehow are to be perceived as the enemy in todays society.
A majority of Americans now want to tax millionaires, who are in many cases, the small business owners who employ most of the Americans as a plan to draw down our debt when it would be a minuscule touch to that enormous deficit at the expense of jobs, called the Buffet Rule. But who is talking about curbing the entitlements that encourage able people NOT to work, but sit at home waiting for the government check?
Who discusses the way we have rewarded the youth today with trophies for just showing up to ball games, allowing students to pass on to the next grades without meeting the basic curriculum ending with students who cannot read on a 4th grade level in 8th grade leading to drop outs at an alarming rate?
We give out grants to college and offer remedial reading and writing courses there demonstrating these students dont belong there in the first place.
We have parents who are still allowing their kids to live in their basements while feeding and clothing them well after the age of majority. Who has dropped the ball here? The OWS has been a perfect example of the lost generation where they want what others have without working for it. Is this our future generation?
"We give out grants to college student"? We? Republicans act as if they aren't the ones getting the bulk of food stamps, Medicare, Social Security and Welfare. Hilarious.
Why did the right stop touting personal responsibility?
Because they did not want to take personal responsibility for supporting the Iraq war?
For supporting Bush?
For supporting the Governerator?
You missed the entire point.
I wonder if he'll take responsibility for that...
With this class divide that is being created in this country, I wonder if Personal Responsibility has become a goal of the past. We hear of the horrid 1% truly successful individuals and how they somehow are to be perceived as the enemy in todays society.
A majority of Americans now want to tax millionaires, who are in many cases, the small business owners who employ most of the Americans as a plan to draw down our debt when it would be a minuscule touch to that enormous deficit at the expense of jobs, called the Buffet Rule.
But who is talking about curbing the entitlements that encourage able people NOT to work, but sit at home waiting for the government check?
Who discusses the way we have rewarded the youth today with trophies for just showing up to ball games, allowing students to pass on to the next grades without meeting the basic curriculum ending with students who cannot read on a 4th grade level in 8th grade leading to drop outs at an alarming rate?
We give out grants to college and offer remedial reading and writing courses there demonstrating these students dont belong there in the first place.
We have parents who are still allowing their kids to live in their basements while feeding and clothing them well after the age of majority. Who has dropped the ball here?
The OWS has been a perfect example of the lost generation where they want what others have without working for it. Is this our future generation?
Personal Responsibility a thing of the past?
With this class divide that is being created in this country, I wonder if Personal Responsibility has become a goal of the past. We hear of the horrid 1% truly successful individuals and how they somehow are to be perceived as the enemy in todays society.
A majority of Americans now want to tax millionaires, who are in many cases, the small business owners who employ most of the Americans as a plan to draw down our debt when it would be a minuscule touch to that enormous deficit at the expense of jobs, called the Buffet Rule. But who is talking about curbing the entitlements that encourage able people NOT to work, but sit at home waiting for the government check?
Who discusses the way we have rewarded the youth today with trophies for just showing up to ball games, allowing students to pass on to the next grades without meeting the basic curriculum ending with students who cannot read on a 4th grade level in 8th grade leading to drop outs at an alarming rate?
We give out grants to college and offer remedial reading and writing courses there demonstrating these students dont belong there in the first place.
We have parents who are still allowing their kids to live in their basements while feeding and clothing them well after the age of majority. Who has dropped the ball here? The OWS has been a perfect example of the lost generation where they want what others have without working for it. Is this our future generation?
Personal Responsibility a thing of the past?
With this class divide that is being created in this country, I wonder if Personal Responsibility has become a goal of the past. We hear of the horrid 1% truly successful individuals and how they somehow are to be perceived as the enemy in todays society.
A majority of Americans now want to tax millionaires, who are in many cases, the small business owners who employ most of the Americans as a plan to draw down our debt when it would be a minuscule touch to that enormous deficit at the expense of jobs, called the Buffet Rule. But who is talking about curbing the entitlements that encourage able people NOT to work, but sit at home waiting for the government check?
Who discusses the way we have rewarded the youth today with trophies for just showing up to ball games, allowing students to pass on to the next grades without meeting the basic curriculum ending with students who cannot read on a 4th grade level in 8th grade leading to drop outs at an alarming rate?
We give out grants to college and offer remedial reading and writing courses there demonstrating these students dont belong there in the first place.
We have parents who are still allowing their kids to live in their basements while feeding and clothing them well after the age of majority. Who has dropped the ball here? The OWS has been a perfect example of the lost generation where they want what others have without working for it. Is this our future generation?
Good thinking on your part; good post.
I'd like to add two things aimed at understanding the phenomenon that you've highlighted:
1. Sociologist Helmut Schoecks observation: Since the end of the Second World War, however, a new ethic has come into being, according to which the envious man is perfectly acceptable. Progressively fewer individuals and groups are ashamed of their envy, but instead make out that its existence in their temperaments axiomatically proves the existence of social injustice, which must be eliminated for their benefit. Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, p. 179
2. "But the dissolution of the belief in the work ethic began with the cultural protests of the 1960s, which questioned and discarded many traditional American virtues. The roots of this breakup lay in what Daniel Bell described in "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism" as the rejection of traditional bourgeois qualities by late-nineteenth-century European artists and intellectuals who sought to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification of life.
a. By the 1960s, that modernist tendency had evolved into a credo of self-fulfillment in which nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored, Bell wrote. Out went the Protestant ethics prudence, thrift, temperance, self-discipline, and deferral of gratification. As the editor of the 1973 American Work Ethic noted, affluence, hedonism and radicalism became the new axiom. The time-honored definition of virtue abandoned the notion of rewarding traditional bourgeois virtues like completing an education or marrying to substitute pursuit of cash, recycling trash, saving endangered species, showing tolerance and sensitivity.
b. Attitudes toward businessmen changed, too. While film and television had formerly offered a balanced portrait of work and employers, notes film critic Michael Medved in Hollywood vs. America, from the mid-1960s onward, movies and TV portrayed business executives almost exclusively as villains or buffoons.
c. University education departments began to tell future grammar school teachers that they should replace the traditional teacher-centered curriculum, aimed at producing educated citizens who embraced a common American ethic, with a new, child-centered approach that treats every pupils personal development as different and special. During the 1960s, when intellectuals and college students dismissed traditional American values as oppressive barriers to fulfillment, grammar schools generally jettisoned the traditional curriculum. Education professors eagerly joined New Left professors to promote the idea that any top-down imposition of any curriculum would be a right-wing plot designed to perpetuate the dominant white, male, bourgeois power structure, writes education reformer E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his forthcoming The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools.
d. When schools threw out the bourgeois values that had helped to sustain Webers rational tempering of the impulse to accumulate wealth, they removed the rationality in rational self-interest, or, as Tocqueville put it, self-interest rightly understood. The new every child is special curriculum prompted a sharp uptick in students self-absorption, according to psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell in "The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement." What resulted was a series of increasingly self-centered generations of young people displaying progressively more narcissistic personality traits, including a growing obsession with material wealth and physical appearance, the authors observe. Adam Smiths "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," traces the evolution of ethics from mans nature as a social being who feels shame if he does something that he believes a neutral observer would consider improper. Modern experiments in neuroscience have tended to confirm Smiths notion that our virtues derive from our empathy for others, therefore being self-centered is the antithesis of a sense of shame. [An extensive explanation of the Lefts control of education may be found in Pedagogy of the Oppressor, by Sol Stern at Pedagogy of the Oppressor by Sol Stern, City Journal Spring 2009"
Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic? by Steven Malanga, City Journal Summer 2009
Very thought provoking.
I had half joked about calling this newest generation, the Bartleby Generation. Then I found an actual college project called The Bartleby Project where members refuse to do course work and refuse to take tests but still expect excellent grades.
But I know a lot of people whose grown children do live at home and make the aging parents' lives hell.
