Forum Post: Take some personal responsibility, son.

I know there are (for some reason) a lot of people posting on the forums with some disturbingly regressive views about the people protesting on Wall Street. My favorite by far is the one concerning lazy bums who want some kind of handouts, because unlike their parents they can't work hard enough to get the same kind of job with the same kind of benefits and a living wage.

Let's dissect that.

What you are basically stating in factual terms is that a child born in 1990 is intrinsically works less hard then someone born in say 1970. Where in the world do you get such an idea? It is about as offensive and preposterous as saying that black people intrinsically work less hard then white people. Can you back up any of these claims?

No, because there is absolutely no factual basis to it. It is convenient to blame others for being lazy when you have achieved some sort of success in life. Perhaps you did win many scholarships and worked hard to get to where you are today. And there are of course people who didn't. But frankly going into some personal rant about how hard you worked to get yourself through college doesn't matter. I’ll go a step further: it’s rude and condesending.

Think logically and systematically. The reason the whole moralistic stance is irrelevant is because it simply cannot apply to most people stuck in this crisis. The more expensive college gets and the less aid there is available, the more loans that students have to take out. The less jobs there are, the less chances there are that increasing amounts of college students coming out with debt will get them. Graduates who cannot get the few jobs that are actually appropriate to their education lever will work in jobs that they are over-qualified for, usually in the service industry. As a result, the employer will mostly hire those that already possess a college degree, pushing everyone without a college degree out of the market. Or perhaps, the boss at McDonalds won’t hire graduates, and only kids that he knows have no out but to work minimum wage at McDonalds. Either way, most people are left unemployed.

Let me restate my point, if everyone just had enough “motivation” and “virtue” and “worked really hard,” a majority would still be left either jobless or underpaid, with no benefits, and no futures to look forward to. Most careers that will lead to a job will still ensure that you work longer hours for less pay.

So whether you got lucky or had some sort of support or grew up with better resources than most, personal responsibility has nothing to do with it. Nobody would tell a girl who was born with a learning disability that she should take “personal responsibility” because she can’t perform as well as her classmates. Telling people who can’t get jobs or who are drowning in student loans to take “personal responsibility” because they could not predict the state of the economy after they graduated is just as absurd. What you are really saying is that people have gotten too used to having decent shelter, clothing, and food. That they should be okay with less and less, that they should be happy that they still have scraps to fight over.

Like many phrases in American politics the term “personal responsibility” is completely devoid of meaning and used as a weapon to attack working and middle class people in order to blame them personally for their economic hardships.