It\u2019s all your fault. You — you personally — didn\u2019t do enough to stay safe from the pandemic.<\/p>\n
For that matter, you didn\u2019t do enough to prepare for retirement or for getting laid off or for getting sick or injured so you couldn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n
You borrowed too much money to go to school or buy a house and now it\u2019s your fault that you don\u2019t make enough money to pay it back.<\/p>\n
And it goes without saying that you bought too many things, took too many trips, and didn\u2019t recycle. You caused climate change.<\/p>\n
I could go on, but you get the gist. It\u2019s all about personal responsibility here. If things are wrong in our society, our world, it\u2019s all your fault and my fault and the fault of every individual who ever had to make a decision on the fly in an over-complicated world.<\/p>\n
Bullshit. <\/p>\n
Don\u2019t get me wrong. I\u2019m all in favor of people being personally responsible. A lifetime in the martial arts makes one think like that. I get tired of hearing people whine about things they could fix if they took better charge of their lives, too.<\/p>\n
But personal irresponsibility is not the reason the pandemic is out of control in the United States. I\u2019m very tired of hearing blamed heaped on those who got together with others for a holiday, and I say that as someone who stayed home at Thanksgiving and Christmas just as I have been doing every day for the past ten months.<\/p>\n
Personal responsibility is one small part of our lives as human beings on this planet. One of the places we most need to exercise it is in working cooperatively and responsibly with our fellow human beings. Working together well is how we keep ourselves safe and take care of each other.<\/p>\n
One of the ways we work together is by developing systems. Mutual aid societies, cooperatives, and similar organizations are important, but let\u2019s not forget government. Even monarchies are supposed to take care of their people, but in a democracy, the whole idea is that we set up a government to take care of the things we need.<\/p>\n
In the case of the pandemic, our government has completely failed us. True, this is in large part due to the fact that we ended up with a con man who wanted to be king in charge of our federal government and many people in positions of responsibility spent their time enabling him, so that we did not have the right people in the right jobs to handle a crisis of any kind.<\/p>\n
But it is also true on the state and local level, where our public health agencies and preparations for pandemics have been shunted aside for many years.<\/p>\n
Given the failures of our governments, it\u2019s no surprise that people left to their own devices made bad decisions.<\/p>\n
This is a good place to point out that pandemics have been at the top of the list of possible crises for some time. Read some good science reporting from ten years back. Read some science fiction. Read the damn news. We ducked worldwide pandemics at least three times in the last twenty years.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019ve been personally responsible. The riskiest thing I\u2019ve done since the pandemic hit is go to the grocery store, wearing a mask and swearing at people who weren\u2019t doing a good job of keeping their distance.<\/p>\n
And I did end up saving for retirement (much to the relief of my family, who didn\u2019t think I was preparing at all well to take care of myself), though that\u2019s because I went to work for a company that was employee owned and had a union (cooperation and mutual aid). I bought stock in my company and I got a pension because the union fought for such things.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve done all those things and I don\u2019t feel safe at all, because I can\u2019t fix everything by taking personal responsibility or even by cooperating with my co-workers. Too many of the problems of the world are too complex for one person, even a very responsible person, to solve on their own.<\/p>\n
For example, if I should develop Alzheimer\u2019s disease and end up in a care home (for which I hopefully have enough money), I cannot control whether that care home is properly run. For that I need government oversight and systems.<\/p>\n
Have you seen the Covid death rate of people in nursing homes and assisted living lately? The care homes aren\u2019t doing well. Many of them are owned by corporations that are milking them for money and not providing good services.<\/p>\n
And finding an opening in one in a time of crisis is very hard. Often people don\u2019t realize just how bad the place is until after something horrible has happened to their loved one.<\/p>\n
The pandemic has shown us just how far away our government systems are from providing us the services we really need.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s high on the list of things to fix, once we get the criminals out of our government, deal with the insurrectionists, and get the pandemic under control.<\/p>\n
At the moment the best use of your personal responsibility is to lobby your government officials and work with your neighbors to build the kind of democracy that we need.<\/p>\n
Oh, yeah, and wear a mask, keep your distance, wash your hands, and don\u2019t get together in person with people you don\u2019t live with.<\/p>\n
Me, I\u2019m spending my time trying to figure out when I can get the vaccine. I\u2019m getting tired of being so damned responsible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s all your fault. You — you personally — didn\u2019t do enough to stay safe from the pandemic. For that matter, you didn\u2019t do enough to prepare for retirement or for getting laid off or for getting sick or injured so you couldn\u2019t work. You borrowed too much money to go to school or buy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,16,17],"tags":[201],"class_list":["post-941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid-life","category-essays","category-rants","tag-personal-responsibility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":944,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions\/944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}