Self reliance, responsibility and Obama
When our newly seated President has to be the adult in the room and tell the American public to be more self-reliant and responsible (excerpts at the end of this post), it certainly makes one worry about how far the American public has fallen away from our core values. At the very least he appears to be walking the talk, taking responsibility for some poor cabinet nominations (or at the very least, some horrible background checks by his staff).
Recent events, especially hurricanes in my near vicinity, have brought to the forefront that Americans (or at least Texans!), when we have to, are quite self-reliant, and very good at helping thy neighbor. The image burned in many minds of Hurricane Katrina is the picture of people sitting on their suitcases outside the SuperDome awaiting Government rescue…quite the opposite of self-reliance. It may be a media perception of national media coverage versus local media, but those type of pictures were not evident in the Hurricane Ike disaster…though there were many of people helping each other.
The fact remains that many in our country took the President’s admonishment that we need to take care of ourselves as something new and revolutionary when in truth it is, as he says, part of the core principals our country was founded on. (more…)
