Father's Day Thoughts on Personal Social Responsibility in My Generation

I have witnessed a growing crisis in this country over the last twenty years, embodied by a complete lack of personal responsibility in many social contexts. When I say personal social responsibility, I am talking about a special kind of integrity and willingness to stand up for what you believe in, that seems to have gone out of style. When I say there is a crisis, I am talking about the wholesale surpassing of what an individual believes to be right and worth standing up for with what an individual believes to be seen as acceptable to get involved in; the vacuum of irresponsibility and the abyss of apathy this creates.

Being a relatively young man I grew up in the 70's, in a world where as far as personal responsibility went there was the old and the new living side by side, but ideologically separate and at odds. On the one hand we had the aging grandparents nearing or at retirement age who had lived through the depression and carried America through the second world war, who believed their hard nosed, God fearing values would be passed along to their children and grandchildren the way they had been passed along to them; only to be ambushed by the myriad of changes that kept this model from progressing as it had for the generations before. On the other hand, we had the children of this soon to be vanishing generation that had created the social change of the 60s, lived through the Vietnam war and the assassinations of Kennedy and King and were so sure that almost everything their parents had taught them was surely flawed at the core and needed to be rejected. Caught in the middle you had the grandchildren, as I was, thrown into this battle between the old and the new about what was the right way to live, and what was worth believing in. We were the experiment that was surely going to prove that throwing out the old ideas was going to lead to a new and better world, and prove once and for all that "they" had been wrong. As with any plan that compares the results of one sides imagination against the results in reality of the other, there were some bumps and twists in the new road yet unseen. My generations ability to stand up for anything it believes in, or even be confident in their right to believe in anything, was one of the casualties.

Today we see videos of crowds of people standing by as strangers are run over by a car or beaten to death and nobody in the crowd responds or acts to help. There would have been no question for our grandparents, they would have put themselves at risk without thought and the strangers in the crowd would have joined. Our parents probably would have acted in some way, because even though they decided to reject the ideas they had been brought up with, they still had them down there somewhere, and these extreme situations would have brought them to the surface enough at least to do something even though they would not have been able to count on the crowd for support. Now my parents generation are the aging and the weak; the crowd and our society is controlled by us, their children, a generation that was never quite sure what to believe in and what was worth standing up for. We see this dynamic in far less dramatic situations every day: when we see a parent yelling and swearing at her child over a trifle in the grocery store and we turn away; when we stand silently second in line while a customer verbally abuses a minimum wage employee over something far beyond their control; when we hear our friends yelling at a customer support person on the phone and threatening a lawsuit over an issue that deserves no such drama. In each of these situations, a normal member of my grandparents generation would have commented or acted assuredly from the obvious perspective that these things were not right, and brought the full force of social ridicule upon on these individuals with the full support of their peers. My parents generation would have wanted to do something but not been sure what was the right thing to do, so decided upon doing nothing in the furtherance of protecting the personal freedom of the individual misbehaving. My generation doesn't even have a glimmer of guilt as we turn away from these situations because they are not our problem, because nobody ever told us they were, and getting involved is obviously going to be inconvenient. This is why the dying person sitting in the street is not helped by the crowd, or the beaten victim is passed by hundreds of people before anyone offers to help, because as a generation we have lost our sense of social responsibility.

The cure for this apathy begins in our personal lives. It begins in the situation where the employee or the customer service person being yelled at says to the customer, "don't you see I am a human being, don't you see it is not right to treat me this way, you must stop." The cure is not in the employee standing up to the customer, the cure is in me as the second person in line, or the friend listening in the background stepping forward and owning my social responsibility by saying, "She is right, you are completely out of line, you should not treat people this way just because you can. You should be ashamed of yourself." Words that would have been completely commonplace in the age of my grandfather, and would probably have been ridiculed in the time of my mother. These are words that my children have only rarely heard as the ghosts of our grandparents look around and shake their heads at the break down in our society and mutter, "is this really what you had in mind?"

As I am facing the fear of ridicule for standing up to someone who has crossed the lines of abusing me and my family in a personal situation, just because they think they can, because the role of customer and employee have been blurred to the extent that they feel any kind of attack and unfounded criticism is acceptable, I have reached out to other members of my community to come together and stand up for what I believe is right. More importantly as I realize that I must be the change I am seeking, I face the fear of standing up against the people who abuse my employees, and yes, even strangers as well. I have decided as my parents did before me that there is something worth standing up for in the world, but in this context, I think my grandparents for all their faults, had this one right. As I sit here on Father's day morning writing and wondering, I hope I can find a way to give my children a chance to learn this lesson from their great-grandparents, even though it is late coming in my own life.