Remember Personal Responsibility?

by Elizabeth Bauchner
Ithaca Community News
June 21, 2006

I can't quite remember who coined the phrase, whether it was Newt Gingrich or some other right-winger, but the term became widely used to describe how welfare mothers needed to pull up their bootstraps and work their way out poverty. I wasn't following politics all that much in the early 1990s because I was too busy being a low-life welfare queen taking advantage of the hapless and hardworking taxpayers of America. My monthly $470 check made me dependent, lazy, and too stupid to get a job, so of course I took zero personal responsibility for deliberately putting myself in the position of young, single mother.

The logic that followed: I was raising the kid, so naturally I assumed no personal responsibility.

No matter, I'm getting off-track. Nowadays, when I think of personal responsibility, I think of a lot more than what I'm going to make my kids for dinner.

Nowadays, when I think of personal responsibility, I think of how much I'd LOVE to see our current administration take some personal responsibility for their choices. And if they can't take personal responsibility, I'd love to see some accountability. For those authorizing torture, killings, human rights abuses, and environmental destruction, I am ready to see them held accountable for their actions.

For a political party that so loves personal responsibility, why hasn't President Bush met with Cindy Sheehan and answered her question? She's been asking for two years what noble cause her son died for, and will be heading back to Texas again in August for another long, hot month while he vacations at his phony ranch. Why is he avoiding her so vehemently if he's so right?

And Rumsfeld? He's responsible, too, for those torture manuals. You know, the ones given to those in charge at Abu Graib and Guantanamo, authorizing the use of near drowning techniques, sleep deprivation, humiliation, and exploitation of phobias. Rumsfeld knows that you can do a lot to a person and not leave a mark; perhaps what he doesn't know is that it doesn't make you any less culpable.

I've got my fingers crossed that the marines involved in the Haditha killings will be prosecuted and forced to show some personal responsibility. President Bush said May 31, "If…laws were broken, there will be punishment." Well, guess what, Mr. Bush, twenty-five percent of the twenty-four civilians killed that day were children shot at close range, and whether or not you can ferret out some justification, shooting children is illegal, even in war. If not by your own questionable ethics, then certainly by your born-again morality.

Our congress needs to show some personal responsibility too, for continuing to appropriate $87 billion per year and more to the war machine alone, while telling us that they have to cut education, cut health care, cut social security. They finally did reauthorize welfare this year—after only five years since the 1996 welfare law (dubiously dubbed the personal responsibility and work reconciliation act) expired. For five years congress couldn't agree on the terms of the bills being introduced because they were too busy bickering over nickels and dimes compared to what we spend on war.

Still, no one cared. Did you see any headlines about welfare reform? Women and children are poorer than ever, and the fingers still point to their own bad choices as the cause of their plight.

As far personal responsibility goes, all I can say is this: I've been responsible for my kids, that much is true. Wherever my income has come from, I've done the mothering thing 24/7 for nearly fifteen years. I've been responsible, and I accept all the choices I've made in life that have gotten me to this point.

Isn't it time we asked our leaders to stand up and do the same?

Copyright © 2006 Ithaca Community News