Who Takes Responsibility Anymore?

If you are an aware person who follows the news of the day in the newspapers, on T.V., listening to the radio, or downloading it on the internet, you are confronted with a plethora of stories in which people do not want to take responsibility for their actions when they do something wrong. It’s always the “other guy” who is at fault, the “ other guy” being someone or something real or imaginary. The “devil made me do it” is another excuse for claiming to be not responsible for your actions.

Take for instance the housing and banking crisis, which was one of the major causes of our financial meltdown which we are in the throes of today. This crisis was spawned in the 1990’s during the Clinton Administration. The CRA (Community Reinvestment Act), which was promoted by the Clinton Administration to help minorities and the poor to buy and own homes, got completely out of control when powerful members in the government pressured banking institutions to relax their lending rules to institute the practice of issuing sub prime mortgage loans to people with questionable abilities to pay back those mortgage loans.

It was the liberal Democrats, led by Sen. Chris Dodd ( D-CT) and Rep. Barney Frank ( D-MA), who, for years, pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go further in promoting sub prime mortgage loans, which are the toxic assets at the heart of today’s financial crisis. Warnings by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan of an impending train wreck in the financial markets, hit a deaf ear in Congress. In addition, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to the President, Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), all warned against the approaching meltdown. Both Dodd and Frank defended the practice and berated the Bush Administration for questioning the lending practices of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac right up to the time the lid blew off both Fannie and Freddie.

If you see Dodd or Frank on T.V. today, you’d think from what they say, that they are the saviors of the country who will lead us back to normalcy, instead of the perpetrators of the largest financial boondoggle since the Great Depression. They take no responsibility or blame for any of the actions that they took prior to the meltdown. You could say that putting Barney Frank in charge of the banking committee and setting its policies, is like putting the fox into the “rooster” house. Chances are these two perpetrators, who show no remorse for their actions, will be re-elected when they come up for re-election next year. What a country!

Add to the mix of not taking responsibility for their wrongful actions, are the people who have been smoking for 40 years and develop lung cancer as a result, then turn around and sue the cigarette companies for their own stupidity. Ever since 1964, when the U.S. Surgeon General came out with the finding that cigarette smoking increases the risk, tremendously, of developing lung cancer (and other physical ailments), people were made aware of the dangers to themselves if they continued to smoke. To compound the stupidity, many juries, feeling sympathy for the sick or dead person, or side with the smoker or his family, or in cases after the smoker died, and issue an award for damages to the smoker or his family. You wonder, sometimes, what these juries must be smoking, and it’s not tobacco.

So, to conclude, taking responsibility for you own actions should be the rule rather than the exception in today’s society, but we must make it something we instinctively do, and we can start by educating our young people that taking responsibility for their actions is the right thing to do and not to blame others for their stupidity, even though admitting that you screwed up is not the easiest thing in the world to admit to.

Written by: Chuck Lehmann