'They Owe Me' Culture

The culture of a country is absolutely critical. Throughout our history the culture of America has been one of self reliance. Personal responsibility goes hand and hand with liberty and freedom. You have the liberty to make your own choices. Work hard and you’ll eat. Slack off and you’ll starve. It’s a naturally reinforcing system.

Unfortunately I think we are losing that. Certainly it isn’t gone and I hope that all of us can think of at least one person that they know who has struggled and persevered and advanced themselves through struggle and hard work. The problem is that changes like this don’t happen all at once, they happen over time and as you continue to feed and nurture the problem it continues to grow.

America is the land of opportunity! And everyone has an opportunity in America to do what they dream of doing. That’s part of the beauty of liberty and freedom; you have the ability to make decisions for yourself. Inherent in that liberty is the freedom to succeed and to fail, and that is a good thing. People need to be able to fail. Businesses need to be able to fail.

Being the father of young kids you learn that you don’t jump up and catch them when they are about to fall. You watch and you monitor so that they learn what is safe and what is dangerous. They learn to manage their own risks and as they get older you monitor less and less. If you follow them around every day and live in a state of paranoia and fear that they are going to hurt themselves, then a) the child isn’t going to understand risks and b) you’ll only wear yourself out in the process.

The situation is actually directly applicable to what we are seeing now. People and companies have over spent and taken some unwise risks; unfortunately the government is following them around and holding out a hand to catch them every time they stumble. Instead of taking their lumps and growing wiser for it, they continue on exactly as they did before, believing that someone will always be there to catch them. Instead a character of self reliance and strength it breeds dependence and entitlement. In the meantime the government will bankrupt the country with out of control spending and endless red ink.

Instead of dreaming of what you might be able to accomplish, you dream of what might be handed to you. Instead of looking within yourself to see where you need to grow and change, you look for a government program to give you a leg up. The shift can appear minor at first and it happens over time, but the long term effects are crushing both personally and on society as a whole.

A person that thinks that the world OWES them something will never accomplish the things that their God given ability and talents would have brought them to. They will never realize their potential because they can’t fuel their own engine of ambition. This country could not have been built by people holding out their hands to the government; it had to be done by men reaching out their hands to take hold of what their dreams and desires told them was possible.

We’re losing that ambition. We’re driving it out of our culture by our actions. People who are carried by their government will eventually lose the ability to carry themselves.