Just two days ago Abdul posted a link on his Facebook page about the woman who is suing the Kroger Company [KR] because an employee shot and killed her son during a botched strong-arm robbery attempt. Her cause of auction alleges that Kroger's was negligent in preventing their employee from having a handgun on the store premises inviolate of company policy.
I posted the following comment on Abdul's page at 9:16 pm just a few hours before the Colorado movie theater terrorist attack.
Stuart Showalter-Political The corporate mantra is - don't take responsibility. Which was then adopted by schools and now some families. Just keep in mind, the government can do everything better than any of us and they are here to help. ;P
My comment reflected the prevailing cultural shift about personal responsibility. This phenomenon started long before my birth but has rapidly accelerated with the spread of socialism across North America.
As recently as the Nuremberg Trials former Nazi officers presented a defense that they were just following orders and therefore were not responsible for their actions. Ultimately though they were held accountable for their actions on the basis of each person still maintains a degree of autonomy and shall be held responsible for his or her actions.
Concurrently there was a shift occurring in corporate governance whereby the broad powers that managers once held began to be restricted. Instead of intuition or gut feeling being the driving force behind fiscal decisions rubrics were developed top level executives to guide the decisions of their underlings. Responsibility was being eroded which would eventually reduce the primarily decision making aspects of management to a processing role.
The same followed for personnel managers. The qualifications for employment are no longer a demonstration of satisfactory performance and character but instead supplying documentation of completion of particular courses of training and a sufficient criminal aptitude of avoiding prosecution for crimes. Don't allow yourself to fall into the trap of believing that a clean criminal history presents a non-criminal
I was once asked by a large school corporation to work for their gifted and talent program. I asked if there was any degree requirements and was told yes. I then said I would have to decline the offer. The same was true when I was asked to teach a law course for a community college.
These administrators knew me and knew I was qualified based upon my demonstrated abilities. They were each able to make the proper judgment call but that responsibility has been stripped from them. Having a degree is not synonymous with qualified. The reason that I advise attorneys and have had to have judges correct their rulings is that I am more competent, qualified if you will, in my area of law. Yet I have no law degree, haven't attended law school and have taken the BAR exam.
As our country still muddles it's way through the housing quagmire created by property purchasers refusing to fulfill their responsibility to pay for the properties as agreed we must acknowledge that these "buyers" were qualified.
It's was through civil rights legislation that bank loan officers began being stripped of their responsibility for making loans to qualified applicants. No longer were applicants approved based upon a demonstrated predictability to pay using knowledge personally gleaned by a loan officer. Instead, a rubric developed at the federal level by bureaucrats following Congressional mandates was imposed upon bank loan officers. Meeting numerical criteria now became the true measure of qualifications. We see where that got us.
We haven't done much better when it comes to families. While the corporate world was stripping it's decision makers of autonomy and responsibility Ronald Reagan came along and decided to push for legislation to make tearing down the family structure easier. As Governor of California he led the effort to make California the first state to abolish adherence to marriage vows and the responsibility to family. As his effort spread across the nation we began to see the turn in positive outcomes for children to where they are on the down slope now.
So where does this get to the injured and dead at the Colorado movie theater shooting? Well, from what I have heard and read about the incident no one shot at the alleged gunman, James Eagen Holmes. This is consistent with numerous other mass shootings that have taken place during the latter part of the twentieth century to the present time. The one I most vividly recall was the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald's massacre where James Oliver Huberty got off over 250 shots before being killed by a SWAT team member SEVENTY SEVEN minutes after the assault began.
As an apt demonstration of how out-of-touch he is with reality President Barack Obama said he was "shocked and saddened" by the rampage. A well-informed and intelligent person with any sense of history would not be shocked by this incident. It follows a simple course of logic.
Over the past 50 years there has been a deliberate effort to indoctrinate members of our society into a belief structure that they are not responsible for their actions. Further, that someone else will be responsible and if anything goes wrong they can absolve themselves of all blame because they followed the established codes related to responsibility and personal autonomy.
As society continues to enact policies and procedures to satiate a demand for psychological tranquility by absolving its members of guilt these types of incidents will continue. We have corporations enacting policies that prohibit employees from protecting themselves, schools doing the same with employees and students and commercial establishments or others who cater to the public also joining in.
Behind it all is the profiteers who make money when you relinquish personal responsibility for your protection and also from scrapping your bloodied dead ass off the walls. With rights comes responsibility and conversely with responsibility comes rights.
So what it comes right down to is this: Although they may not have pulled the trigger, those patrons and society at-large are responsible for their deaths or injuries in that shooting rampage. The unarmed theater employees didn't stop it, the police didn't stop it and the unarmed sheeple didn't stop it. The reason these high death count rampages didn't occur 50 years ago was not for want of effort. It's just that the assailants got taken down before they could complete their task. Quite simply the less defense that is presented the greater the effectiveness of the offense. Just about five hours prior to the movie theater shooting rampage I was in downtown Indy at a political strategy meeting where one of the attendees had his gun openly strapped to his waist -- I have never felt safer except when wearing my body armour.
Give up your rights if you wish and paint a target on your forehead. As for me I prefer to maintain my rights and accept responsibility for where I am. For just as everyone else, regardless of whether they forsake it through denial, I am ultimately responsible for where I am in life; my wealth, my health, my relationships, my job, my happiness and my education. In short -- my life.
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