When I was a little boy, it didn't take me long to learn about personal responsibility. My mom was a single parent (divorce) struggling hard to raise two kids with no help from my father. Early on, she sat my younger brother and I down, explaining the rules and chores we had to do to support her while she went out to be the bread winner. I don't know that anyone, mother or teachers, ever used the term personal responsibility, but I came to understand I was accountable for what I did. And that understanding would be reinforced by my extended family. Blaming something I did on some one else, or on something else, just didn't fly. Funny as it sounds, I can still hear my Mom (and others) asking me, as I tried to explain why it was someone else's fault, if I would jump off the Brooklyn Bridge just because everyone else did. Given a chore, I was expected to get it completed and not doing so meant I, and I alone, would be held responsible. And in those days, my derriere might feel my Mom's hand, or else the pin pong paddle, if I didn't do as I was asked. Worse yet, I might get that look that was enough to tell me that I had screwed up big time. I have to admit not being happy with having to own my stuff and had more than one tantrum about it through the years. However, I learned that being happy didn't necessarily have anything to do with being responsible for my decisions and actions.
It was the same at school. The good Sisters of St. Joseph, who taught me all through K-8, reinforced that idea of personal responsibility teaching us that while we had an obligation to take care of others, the decisions we made were ours and we needed to own them. Yes, I could ask for help, ask for advice, ask for whatever I felt I needed, but none of that meant being able to push off the ownership of my decisions to anyone else. In the Fourth grade, I "ran away" with a classmate and we remained lost the entire day and well into the evening with the police, sisters, family and neighbors looking all over the city for us. We were found by the school janitor and returned to the principle's office where Mother Superior separately read each of us the riot act. And it didn't work blaming each other for what happened. My mom was quiet when she arrived to pick me up. On our walk home, she would remind me of the same thing as she "warmed" my derriere. I made the decision and I had to own it and its consequences.
As I moved on into the military, personal responsibility was certainly the order of the day. Yes, you learned how to work as a Team but each team member was responsible for his own shit (term that combined everything) and trying to blame someone else for what you were suppose to do didn't work at all. You learned quickly that there was no shame in asking for help or guidance but at the end of the day, you were responsible for keeping your shit together. And if you didn't, then you could expect that your Marine Corps brothers would help you to learn it, even if it meant giving you a "hard" kick in the ass.
I took all of the above learning into my work/schooling once I left military service. However, over the years I have discovered that the concept of personal responsibility has somehow morphed to "I'll own it so long as it's good but when the shit hits the fan, it belongs to anyone but me." Personal Responsibility has become selective, clouded by this "who me?" attitude. Something goes wrong and you ask about it and find no one owns anything but the finger used to point the blame elsewhere. Victimization has become one of the escape routes for some in avoiding personal responsibility, but ya know, after all these years, I have finally come to realize that's pure, unmitigated BS. I personally understand victimization but have no tolerance for people using their victimization to avoid personal responsibility for the decisions and actions they take. More troubling however, are the young people I meet today who have never been taught that each of them is responsible for the actions/decisions they make. We seem to have developed a "herd" mentality where it's easier to go with a particular herd than to think and be responsible for yourself. It's not easy sometimes to take personal responsibility for what I've done but failure to do so diminishes me as a person. I build it, I do it, I decide it and I own it. That Truth didn't always make me popular with some of the people I worked with, or managed, but I would not go back and do anything differently.
I wish my mom were still living but I am so thankful (esp for the sometimes warm derriere) that she taught me to never step back from being responsible for the decisions and actions I make in this Journey of Life. I haven't always made the best choices, and my actions haven't always been the best, but I have always owned them and that has been a very good thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment