RIGHTS & responsibilities

I'm not holding my breath, but I'd love to see the old marriage of "Rights & Responsibilities" get back together in the social contract. There was a wonderful coupling if ever there was one.

The marital trouble started back in the 1960's when Rights social esteem rose dramatically while Responsibilities was pushed to the background staying at home taking care of the chores that maintain the American family. It was under the Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) administration that many historical wrongs that existed in the order of things were being addressed. While great, deserving strides were made - the overall approach elevated Rights but set the stage for the divorce by not also emphasizing personal and corporate responsibility.

Certainly the liberation radicals were having a field day. As radicals do, they took their cause to an unsustainable extreme. The government, stuck into a morass of it's own creation by dalliance and micro mismanaging of the military in Viet Nam, failed to effectively manage the domestic issues of that day.

Continuing into the Richard Milhouse Nixon (RMN) administration the liberation movement expanded to include the feminists, the homosexuals, and any other group that now defined itself by their perceived disenfranchisement. Still faced with the Viet Nam involvement (to call it a war is a misnomer less for the lack of a formal declaration of war and more because it was never fought as an all out war - more a large police action) the Nixon administration sought to secure the south and turn the fighting over to the South Vietnamese.

While seeking a second term Nixon's people at the RNC were caught running an espionage operation against the DNC which culminated with the Watergate Impeachment Hearings and Nixon stepping down amid his Vice President, Spiro Agnew having been indicted after investigation on of extortion, tax fraud, bribery and conspiracy. The fact that his hand picked successor, Gerald Ford, granted him a full pardon one month after taking office as POTUS was the last nail in the coffin of confidence in any public official by a large cross section of the population.

This was the final act that that placed personal responsibility in a coma and set RIGHTS on the unmitigated drunken bacchanal that has led to the current sense of victimization and unlimited entitlement. Presidents and politicians, with a rare exception of sorts in Ronald Reagan and a few others, have acted as enablers making excuses and providing the money to keep this self destructive bender from ending in the inevitable consequences and the necessary intervention.

We now find ourselves in a recession, the economic consequence of too much exuberance and without the resources to continue as we have the past 45 or so years. But the intervention has yet to take place. The enablers that have set aside personal and corporate responsibility are still in denial regarding their role in causing it's ongoing comatose state.

There is a reckoning coming. The party will end and very few in authority want to tell the partiers it's gotten late and it's time to call it a day. The current demonstrations demanding even more RIGHTS from the enablers in education, health care, job creation, unemployment coverage will only grow more frequent and - in all likelihood - more violent once the inevitable day dawns.