Our Blog

Please indulge me as I divert from my usual content stream this week.  But I sense a disturbance in The Force…

It strikes this humble observer that Americans are angrier and more self-absorbed than I’ve seen in my few decades of observation.  I’ve talked about this topic before.   The symptoms, small and large, are everywhere: 

• Angrier, more self-absorbed drivers.
• Increasingly oblivious and self-absorbed behavior in public (the loud cell talker on the subway, for example)
• Increasingly contentious politics
• Business strategies and practices designed solely to gratify shareholders now, and right now, at the expense of the future
• Political policies designed more to prevent pain than to solve problems
• Increasingly contentious/obnoxious personal interactions in almost every venue

I’m no sociologist, but, in general, we seem quicker to take a stand, faster to shout down any who would dare to offer a contrary opinion and ever ready to defend our all-important right to What I Want Right Now.   We’ve moved toward a society devoted to The Almighty Me.

This is a nation built on individualism.  That is clear, and a key ingredient in its drive to greatnesst.  Individualists believe in liberty, freedom and the inherent worth of all individuals, majority or minority, and whether we agree with what they do and how they go about it or not (within restraint, of course).   Our love of individualism has brought about revolutionary protection for things such as free speech, free assembly and the like.

But what we seem to be losing, an inch a day, is the necessary counterweight to individualism:  social responsibility.  We’re quickly forgetting that there IS a greater good, and that What I Want Right Now can become a very big problem if we don’t stop to consider the impact of 300 million Almighty Me’s making decisions and acting with nothing else in mind but their immediate needs and wants.

I currently reside in a sleepy retirement community near Cleveland.  I’m not really fond of my suburb, although I very much love Cleveland.  In many little ways, my little suburb reminds me often of what I believe we’re losing sight of increasingly every day.  In just the past year, I’ve heard the following from the denizens of Sleepytown: 

• “Why would I want my property value to go up?  Then I’d have to pay more taxes!”
• “Teachers are way overpaid.  They only work 9 months out of the year.  I have to work 12!”
• “Why would I vote for a school levy?  My kids aren’t in school anymore!”
• “Why go downtown?  It’s 10 minutes from here!”

Maybe these are nit-picky examples, but, in my humble opinion, the answers to the above are as follows: 

• Um…so that you can sell your house.  Oh, and it makes your community more attractive to future contributors.
• Wow.  Really?  We don’t want good teachers here?  We don’t want to do everything we can to improve our community with a future generation of well-educated contributors?
• Of course.  Perhaps you shouldn’t pay taxes any more on anything you don’t directly use or receive from the city, county or state.
• Well, because without a vibrant downtown, there ARE no suburbs.  Trust me.

Now, we can argue about the effective use of taxes, government misspending, etc.  I’m with you on those topics.  Personally, I’d rather see us be asked to do much more and the government be asked to do much less.  That’s just me.    But I’m not seeing conscientious or well reasoned objections.  The thought process starts and ends with “does this help me or hurt me right now?”  I’m seeing a wave of selfish laziness (or, perhaps, lazy selfishness?).  It almost appears that, as a society, we’re growing incapable of making any decision beyond what affects The Almighty Me, and only The Almighty Me right now. 

My fear is that we have become intellectually lazy, that our values don’t go too far beyond comfort and convenience.  This has a broad-reaching impact on everything from politics to economics to simple sociological interaction.  We want the government to save us, save our economy and keep us safe—all without paying anything to support it. We want safe airports, but we can’t stand waiting in a security line.  We somehow have a right to a job (not just the opportunity to work), but we’re all too happy (some folks, anyway) to mail it in when the boss isn’t looking. 

My sense is that entitlement has replaced engagement.  Responsibility has been replaced by some warped new set of universal “rights” (the right to be paid for doing as little possible, the right to do whatever I want, however I want, when I want…).  And heaven forefend that I be asked to extend myself when it’s not absolutely required.

I believe that there are plenty of good people who see the big picture; who recognize that cutting corners and worrying only about themselves, in the end, leads to consequences that have an impact them as well as others.  But it seems as if we’re growing increasingly short sighted—in business, in politics, in every element of our lives.  I don’t have an easy answer as to what exactly is causing this or why.  But I don’t like where it’s going…