chia_monkey's Journal: Accountability revisited

Once again, I'm forced to write about the accountability of people's actions. I should rephrase that to be "the lack of accountability". Just recently I replied to the article on how football and video games make today's kids violent. I stated we as a society have become too damn lazy. Instead of parents taking an active role in raising their children, they simply shove them in front of the TV or ignore them. When their kids misbehave, it's not their fault. It's society's fault...the movies they watch, the games they play.

I write in my journal because the posting got a couple positive replies and then it got a negative one. Perhaps this "under-rater" is one of the parents I alluded to in my posting and they were offended? We may never know. However, we as a society really need to wake up and smell the coffee. You know...we really are responsible for some of our actions. We can't blame everything on society. We're dumbing down our population. It's almost (ok, it's VERY) insulting to have warning on everything (coffee is hot, knife is sharp, don't try this at home) labeled. I tire of listening to parents talk about how the school has failed them in rearing their children while watching their kids run around the store or restaurant with complete reckless abandon. It's not that hard to say "hey, stop it". We can't blame everything on someone else. We've become soft and lazy as a society and it's really kind of disheartening. I'm still a young fella but I feel like an old fogey when I have to rant on about this.

I could go on and on, ranting about numerous personal situations where I've seen the "but it's not my fault" attitude prevail when it clearly IS their fault. If I eat too much and don't exercise, I expect to get fat. If I poke myself in the eye with a fork, I expect to get hurt. If I pour boiling water on my hand, I expect to get burnt. If I never discipline my kids, I expect them to be bad. Thus, I take action to make sure the bad doesn't happen.

Is this the mark of decline for our society? Is this the price we pay for having lived so comfortably for generation after generation? We've become so complacent that now we're going to slowly slide into a society of idiots? Geeze I hope not. Where do we go from here? Will it get better?