Personal Responsibility?

I was born and raised on a small farm in mid California. Everyone raised in those conditions and times learned very early in life that there were things out there that could possibly hurt you. We were taught to be careful in life but told that bad things could still happen to you and it was your responsibility to take care of yourself. Example.....One time I was playing over at my friends farm. Now his father had dug a huge hole in the ground. No idea why. Maybe he was putting in a septic tank or something. Here's the deal though. With such a tempting thing as a deep hole in the ground, where do you think me and my friend were playing? Yup...right there on the edge of that hole of course. Probably throwing rocks in or something young boys do.

Well, the inevitable happened and I fell in. Smacking down in the bottom of that big old hole, I broke my arm. As I lay there yelling, crying and screaming in pain, my friend ran and told his Mom what happened and they called my parents to tell them what happened. My Mom came and everyone dragged my sorry ass out of there and she took me to the local doc to get it fixed. Guess who got in trouble here? Me and my friend of course. All the way to the doctors office my Mom was berating me for doing such a stupid mindless thing as falling in that hole. I knew my friend was getting his ass chewed out real good for the same reason.

Now I'm telling you right now that the idea that my friends parents should be sued or held responsible for having this huge, dangerous hole for me to fall into did not even cross anyone's mind, much less my parents. The only person they were mad at was the people responsible for doing such a stupid thing and that was me and my friend. Can you imagine how different this scenario would be nowadays? Nowadays, not only would people sue those negligent land owners for not properly protecting innocent kids from such a dangerous situation, the people who owned that land might even lose the whole farm over this.

How idiotic is that? Nowadays the injured party would not even feel bad about suing because it's not personal, you see. That's what insurance is for. With the advent of insurance, we have lost our sense of responsibility of our own actions.

Another example. When I was in high school, there were a couple of cool things all of us did. One would be to hang out at the bowling alley and the other would be to go roller skating. Now I remember plain as day, even at that age that as we walked into the roller skating rink, there was a huge sign up on the wall that said:
"Skate at your own risk". As far as everyone was concerned at that time it was a done deal with that sign. It made it perfectly clear that it was our choice and responsibility if anything were to happen while skating.

Another example we've all heard about is the lady who spilled her hot coffee she just bought at a McDonald's and won millions! Now clearly she was not responsible to make damn sure she was careful with that coffee. The restaurant was negligent for having the coffee too hot.

One of the insane things that drives me crazy nowadays are those jerks, mainly in politics both national and local who constantly try and make everything perfectly safe for us. Impossible, I say. What ever happened to the reality of "Shit happens"? Just to make a very clear, concise and direct point. In my perfect world, which doesn't exist of course, when some poor unfortunate kid fell down in the skating rink and became paralyzed from the neck down, everyone would of course feel terrible for him or her but that would be that. His or her parents or family would just have to deal with this unfortunate and sad situation themselves as humans have done all throughout history. The skating rink or society in general would have nothing to do with it.

Whatchathink?



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