Personal responsibility vs. compassion

I watched the movie "Traffic" a few days ago.

It was a great movie, being one that looks at an issue from all sides. There was a scene in which a college student was talking to the "drug czar" for the US.

He was trying to explain the drug traffic in the poorer sections of town. He described the atmosphere in which it happens, the influx of thousands of richer (mostly white) people that pour into these neighborhoods, asking everyone around if they know where there are some drugs for sale.

Imagine living there, with all these rich (by your standards) people asking to buy drugs. Imagine knowing that all you'd have to do is sell some, and you could spend a few hours a day to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars easily.

If that was happening in the richer neighborhoods, how many of those kids do you think would go to law school?

The people that give in and take the easy way out are still responsibilt, but it brings up the concept of personal responsibility vs. compassion.

I was debating declining school grades, and the parent's responsibility with someone once. The man I debated was from another country. I was trying to make the point that the nation was full of single mothers or even full parent households of adults working two, or even three jobs just to keep a roof over them, and food on the table. The more this kind of thing happens, the less likely the parents are to put in the time they should to help and guide their children.

He was all about personal responsibility, saying "it doesn't matter", he knew parents that did without sleep nightly to help their children.

There's a lot of this around, people ignore the societal problems and focus solely on "what they SHOULD have done".

We do horrible things to our young women. We glorify their sexuality, all of society rotates around a pretty young woman.

Later when some of them become manipulative, when they've learned they can behave any way they want to and avoid responsibility by being flirtatious, when they lie, flirt, or even fuck people to get their way, we come down on them hard.

It's true in all of these cases... The assholes deserve it, they fell into a trap. They took the easy way with drugs, let the world keep them from being good parents, or let themselves become social sluts, using and manipulating those around them...

But we also to look however, at how that happens. Some liberals look only at the societal pitfalls, and forgive the individuals because of them.

Some conservatives look only at the personal responsibility, and ignore the societal pitfalls.

We can't ignore either. Assholes (or in the parental cases, the overwhelmed) deserve the results of their actions, we can't save them from that. In the asshole cases, I have no intention of forgiving people for making bad choices.

But we also need to look at why people make these bad choices, why they find the proper actions so hard. We can't ignore the barriers we put in front of people, or the temptations we create for them. Bad behaviour doesn't happen in a vacuum, if we gave people some help, or even a fair shake... If we gave them a SINGLE way out toward a reasonable life, I think we'd find things would get a lot better.