On Choices Without Consequences:
9-21-2021
It used to be pretty well understood and accepted that a person’s choices had consequences. Put your house up in a card game and you risked being homeless. Have unprotected sex and you could end up with a social disease. Lend money to a friend and there’s a good chance it won’t be repaid. Used to be we were pretty clear about all this. Those days are gone.
America is now a nation of individuals that can do whatever we want, without consequences. At least any negative consequences. We can avoid using any COVID precautions and if we get the virus, we expect our hospitals to go all out to heal us. We can invade a foreign country, install a puppet government, allow massive corruption and expect to leave when we want without any residual death, pain or suffering. We can treat a number of our co-citizens differently than ourselves and expect them to take it and shut up. We can break campaign laws and secretly represent foreign governments and expect to be pardoned for our criminality. We can rip off our employees and break all the labor laws while scoffing at the agencies that are supposed to hold us accountable. We can even go on a vigilante hunt in the Capitol of the United States, assault law officers, ransack the offices of the highest government officials and are surprised that the results are fines, jail and public isolation. All this under the banner of “freedom” and “patriotism”.
We are deep into the process of redefining the concept of being responsible for our actions. In a nation of 300+ million people, we have decided that each of us is entitled to do whatever we want, whenever we want. The consequences are some other person’s problem. To pull of this magical delusion requires us to deny how interconnected and reliant on each other we actually are. It’s okay for me to shoot fireworks off until the wee hours of the morning, when my neighbors have to get up at 5am to go to work. But if they let their dogs’ take a dump on my lawn every day, there’d be hell to pay. When we insist on our own “freedom”, we also put blinders on when it comes to how someone else, exercising that same level of “freedom” might be a consequence we don’t like. Taken to its extreme, we’re saying it’s okay for me to shoot someone I disagree with, but they don’t have the same right to shoot me because they decide I’m an asshole.
A nation, any nation, has a basic requirement for its citizens to accept that their individual rights have to be superseded by laws and rules that allow the nation’s people to live in harmony. It can’t be any other way. To get around this necessity, we conveniently avoid saying we’re trampling on another person’s space. Instead we throw up a boogeyman, THE GOVERNMENT. As if the government is some other force we can be against because we refuse to acknowledge that it is the way those laws and rules are agreed upon. But hey, no government, no laws and rules, nothing in the way of us doing whatever to whoever.
When reality hits us, we get angry. “I’m not letting the government tell me I have to get a shot”. “That cop who choked that black guy got a raw deal”. “Yeah, I wanted out of Afghanistan, but no one should have died and the Taliban shouldn’t have taken back over”. “Whatdaya mean those low-life’s won’t go to work?” “This climate stuff is all bullshit, but the government better speed up my disaster relief because that hurricane took out my house”. “It’s all the fault of immigrants and Biden”. We’re pretty good at making excuses when the consequences of our “freedom” slap us upside our heads.
For better or worse, the reckoning day is coming. There are lots of people around the world who are buckling down and figuring out how to work together to survive and prosper in a challenging global environment. Our “consequences be damned” attitudes are robbing us of precious time to do the same. But like the mouse throwing its middle finger at the attacking hawk, the last words of this great nation might well be “we showed them, didn’t we”!
ihg 9-21-2021
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