AMERICA'S VICTIM IDENTITY......and why it matters so much

If and when you get old like me, there is a good chance you may find yourself taking note of how the world has changed over your lifetime.     Sometimes for the better. 

Sometimes not. 

As I prepare to turn what seems to me like a very big 8-0 next year (a point I not so long ago considered to be some ancient relic of old age) some things seem increasingly clear.   First, some things haven’t changed at all.   For one, bad things still happen in the world.   Evil still exists to torment our human sensitivities. 

But some things have changed.   For one, bad things used to happen when we humans made bad choices.   We owned responsibility for much of what went wrong in the world.   We made our mistakes.   We learned from them.  And we hoped to improve and make better choices in the future.  For example, if I got in trouble with a teacher in school, it was always my fault.  Never the teacher’s fault.   And at home, it was also my fault.   Not my parents.   Not the other kids in the neighborhood.   It was my responsibility to make better choices if I didn’t like being in trouble.

Somewhere along the way things changed.   People became victims.  Lawsuits that used to be rare became common.   Responsibility for our bad choices became the fault of “them.”    Lawyers seemed to come out of the woodwork here in America, and over the course of time more civil suits claiming damages owed by “them” happened.    The abnormal became normal.    The rare became common.

When social structures of this nature shift, and responsibility gets projected away from “me” to “them,” it doesn’t stop bad things from happening.    Not really.   To an extent, safety standards have improved where design and manufacturing are concerned.    Or so it seems within some industries such as home wiring and automobiles.   However, safety has declined in other areas, gun deaths being one.  In a strange play on words, fires kill fewer people now but firearms kill many more (thanks to what the late Chief Justice of our Supreme Court called the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people: the NRA's gross misinterpretation of our 2nd Amendment).           

Just because we shift from shame to blame, from guilt to anger, from “I’ll live and learn” to “I’ll teach them a thing or two” doesn’t keep accidents from happening.    Or people from dying.  Or people from getting into trouble (now it’s the teachers and not the students, the doctors and not the patients).   It creates a nation of victims.   Everyone seems to have a gripe or a grievance against whoever “them” might be.  And it truly didn’t use to be that way.    Victimhood is now fashionable here.   Irresponsible behavior is now somehow “okay.”   Starting with the highest political office in the land.

So what?

Why does it matter?

Responsibility for one’s own choices and consequences seems, in my humble opinion, to be our best teacher in life.    We live and learn.    We live and let “them” live as well.   We learn to tolerate “them” and refrain from seeing the worst in others.   We learn better self-reliance skills and expect fewer “rescues” from populist politicians and fewer “silver bullets” from the local pharmacy as promised by our advertising industry.  Not to mention fewer firearms and bullets meant to stop "them" from "victimizing" us.

Most of all, responsibility provides for our freedom.    Self-rule comes with self-control.  Being a victim of “them” makes us a slave of “them.”    We give away our own power over our own destinies.    We cede control over our own lives.   We allow “them” to regulate our own emotions and “make us feel” what we do not want to feel.  We wave the white flag of surrender and lose our independence, our liberty, our freedom.

In this next 6 mos. or so, America will be asked to celebrate 250 years of independence, of liberty, of freedom.   But from my own perspective in looking back over just less than 80 of those years, it will mostly be a pretend-celebration because of our changing identity.  

Because of our American victim identity we will at the rate we're going declare our dependence on "them" for who we are in this world. The only way I can see to declare our independence, or seriously celebrate those who did so 250 years ago, is to take back responsibility for our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. We can either identify as victors or victims in this new year, but we can't be both. We can either be responsible or irresponsible, but we can't be both. We can either be free or enslaved, but we can't be both.

And that matters to all of us.