THE RASCAL BEHIND THE TREE

When a tragedy such as the school shooting in Florida occurs there seems to be a need to place blame. Now I am fine with blaming the shooter, but the popular notion is to blame almost everything and everybody else except the shooter. It was reported just today that the blame should fall upon the JROTC program. This was denounced as a war machine. The group, “Code Pink”, has asked that the program be eliminated from our schools. They went further to state the shooter was trained to be a marksman by the US Army in the JROTC program. So then it must be the fault of the Army that this shooter killed all those people. No, morons, it is the fault of the shooter. Not his guns, not his mother, not some societal woe either real or imagined, and most certainly not a program designed to prepare young people for real life.

Why is it that some among us must find a boogie man in every tragedy other than the actual villain who perpetrated the tragedy?

Consider Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. They just sued several major pharmaceutical manufacturers because three hundred thirty-six people died of opioid overdoses in their county last year. Their thinking is that it must be the fault of the supplier of the drugs rather than the abuser of the drugs. Never mind that these drugs are produced to benefit individuals in pain and they are designed to assist in the healing process. No, because some idiots abused the product, the manufacturer must be punished. And subsequently then anyone who actually needs this medication for real pain.

This reminds me of the lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers. Millions of dollars were awarded to plaintiffs for damages real or imagined in an effort to make everybody feel better. Poor bereaved widows and widowers had to have justice. Somebody had to pay.  Here again the thinking seems to be that smokers have no choice but to be controlled by the producers of cigarettes. As a former smoker I can tell you I never had a cigarette jump into my mouth and light itself. No, I made those stupid decisions myself and have no one but myself to blame for it. I can also tell you that, while it took me several years to arrive at the decision, I quit smoking because I believed it was harmful to my health.

What we are talking about is of course, personal responsibility. It has become fashionable to place responsibility on everyone and everything except the actual perpetrator.

Let’s talk guns. I am a gun owner. I have owned guns for most of my life. I use them for hunting, target practice but mostly for protection. Owning guns is my right as an American citizen. How I use those guns could be an issue. I have to be responsible. I have to keep my guns away from children. I never play with them. They are tools for responsible adults. If I don’t use my guns responsibly, then I could and should suffer the consequence of poor decisions.

As a youngster I often heard, “If it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, then it must have been that rascal behind the tree.” Of course there wasn’t a rascal behind a tree, the rascal was me. It was a way of teaching personal responsibility.

We, as a country, are facing many problems. Most of those problems could be fixed by our just taking responsibility for our actions or our inactions. People born into poverty don’t have to continue their lives in poverty. People who believe they were denied a proper education don’t have to live their lives uneducated. In the final analysis we are all personally responsible for ourselves. There is no rascal behind the tree. Perhaps it’s only thee.

Ron Scarbro