“Take responsibility for your own actions.” Just another bullshit phrase the Right shoe-horns into as many verbal exchanges as they can. Listen to a conservative long enough and I just about guarantee you’ll hear them say this. It's just one of their many stupid fortune cookie sayings they throw out; an axiom coated with bullshit and filled with something worse.
On a side note, I like stock sayings, too, like, “That’s not funny; my brother died that way.” I like to shoe-horn that line from The Onion into my conversations whenever I can. It is just as stupid as the mantra of the Right but it keeps me entertained.
“These people need to take responsibility for their own actions.” I’ll bet Rush Limbaugh has said this about poor people about 10 million times. They need to take responsibility for their own actions and become rich and arrogant and stupid like him. Of course, when Rush was caught with a huge stash of pain killers he took responsibility for his own actions by blaming his problem on back pain. Thousands of pain killers for back pain? Take the pain like a man, Rush. I’ve had debilitating back pain; most athletes have at one time or another. I passed on the pain killers and opted for weight training. I save drugs for recreational use and I don’t get addicted and I certainly don’t get caught. But I’m a liberal who can‘t take responsibility for my own actions.
Rich people are able to take responsibility for their own actions but poor people are always asking for help. The fact that the federal government helps rich people more than poor people is beside the point. Dick Cheney’s Halliburton got billions of dollars in help from the government in the form of fat contracts yet in the vice presidential debates of 2000 he claimed that the government had nothing to do with his prosperity. He took responsibility for his own actions by using his status as a former public servant to make millions. That isn’t the same as somebody cashing a food stamp for a loaf of bread.
And speaking of food stamps; Hey rich people, doesn’t it piss you off when you see people buy candy with food stamps? It would but in the current stratification of America rich people don’t come within ten miles of poor people so they tell middle income people to be pissed at people on food stamps. Middle income people who are one lay-off from needing help themselves. Middle income people whose manufacturing jobs are being carefully scrutinized by the rich to see whether or not it is feasible to send their jobs overseas if it means they can increase profits.
Why do so many people who have “made it” in this country think that they did it all on their own by taking personal responsibility? I know people like this who have benefited from good, inexpensive public education and student loans and think that they did it all on their own. Now they bitch about paying taxes to support the programs that got them where they are today. This mantra of personal responsibility is pretty much a lie. We all count on a lot of things to help us meet our goals. Stop thinking that you are such a fucking island.
If I wanted to make this essay longer I could further elaborate why this phrase is so dear to the Right and their notion of seeing themselves as self-made men but long essays bore people and that's not funny; my brother died that way.
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