Project Logic Ga

This is a little too strong

Personal Responsibility: Choices, Decisions and Consequences; Deliberation; Focus; Family Engineering; Self-analysis

Elected officials and others in the political arena spend too much time giving the public the impression that governmental actions can fix what is wrong most of the time.  If you think about it, most of the solutions start with personal responsibility (PR); people owning what they did, will do and what they should teach children to do.

The conservative movement devoted considerable amounts of attention to PR over the years but some of those guys can be mean with it.  A better approach would be to firmly and positively encourage people to select a different path or course of action.  It’s all about mindset.

We should acknowledge that Speaker Newt Gingrich has had the right idea in the past when he wasn’t being playfully mean himself.  Gingrich use to say that the federal government’s limited role was to create a fair playing field; a climate in which people’s prosperity was determined by their actions.  Of course, we haven’t had that climate in America yet but it’s a better approach than the almost socialist method of having people think that the government should act to correct what’s wrong in their lives.  Newsflash: there will be winners and losers in life.  As Prince sang in Pop Life, “Everybody can’t be on top.”

If your life stinks, you should ask yourself if the stench is the result of what you did or didn’t do.  You went to elementary school with people who ended up at Florida State University and people who ended up at Florida State Penitentiary.  While parenting is a factor, most of us could have done more to be the masters of our fates.

Choices, Decisions and Consequences (CDC): While teaching in a job training program, I luckily turned on ESPN to see a speaker breaking CDC down for NFL rookies.   You have choices in life, you make decisions about those choices and you better be ready to accept the consequences of those decisions.  Since the begining of humankind, it’s has been about the organic/natural CDC process.

However, government involvement (while well-intended) introduces inorganic or unnatural aspects into the process.  Yes, we need a safety net to help during rough periods but some folks feel that the awareness of assistance encourages risky decision-making.  Hell, some people want to argue more with the government about money for raising kids than with the kid’s other parent.  A trip to the assistance office comes before a trip to the hiring fast food business.  People need to own or live in the reality created by their actions—stop the blame game.

Deliberation: I am amazed by the ease with which people make life-altering decisions. Big choices and actions should require a very slow, well-researched decision-making process.  One must be deliberate in his actions.  It’s sad but true that some young people give more consideration to which pictures to post online than when and with whom to have a child.  “I just happen to be in the car with those guys when someone started shooting at them about something.”

Of course, deliberation starts with research and research begins from the knowledge and wisdom of wiser people. Guys taking life skills advice from friends on the corner is the very definition of the blind leading the blind.  General Colin Powell said that you should never take counsel from unproductive people.

Focus: Once good decisions are made, they must be implemented and executed with focus—keep your eyes on the prize.  Smart people design and map out goals and objectives.

Family Engineering: Can people in the public policy arena openly discuss this subject or does that discussion violate the ethics of public policy; this isn’t China.  I broach the subject because poorly engineered or planned families cost the taxpayers billions.  Who had a baby with whom at what time and under what financial conditions?  Time is big because reasonable people know that folks in their late teens to early 20s are still growing into who they will be.  The moms in my job training program often said that life would have been better if they simply had their kids five years later and after better knowing the fathers (they would have selected better guys who were they husbands.)

The age-old discussion in college social science classes is the debate between nature and nurture.  Is behavior based on DNA, environment or a combination?  Either way, family members often put their faces in their hands when they discover who a family member is having a baby with, for or whatever. Again, where is the deliberation?  Grandmother is going to spend money for the next 18 years; she might be 65 years old with a net worth of less than $6,500 because she kept helping her family members.  Mercy.

Can we get back to the days when you knew who you were and whose you were?  People once functioned with a sense of community; they were mindful of “how you carried yourself” and folks knew that good families required careful cultivation like good crops.

Self-analysis: Quick, name a close friend who isn’t good at self-analysis.  From the good, the bad and the ugly, improvements in any aspect of life start with taking an honest look in the mirror.   Of course, people can’t be critical of themselves if their mindsets are twisted.  Some people never say or think that they are wrong or could have handled something better.

Why are we having a personal responsibility discussion on a public policy forum?  This discussion is needed because people sometimes make horrible life choices and taxpayers directly or indirectly end up with the bill.  That situation simply isn’t fair and we must find a way to reverse it.