Total Responsibility means the buck stop here!

I was pondering on the personal responsibility piece that I wrote yesterday and I received a call from a someone looking for a drug treatment program. In the conversation, I said that I was happy to do whatever I could to help and he said "that is awfully white of you"... a racial slur that I hadn't heard in years and I later thought that packaging groups of people in ways that makes them less that totally real is a way, of course, to take away some of their power, but it is also our human's shirk their on responsibility for the situation.

Full responsibility for the condition of those people in our society that have suffered at the hand of suppression requires that we give them at least equal respect to any other group or individuals, but preferably we recognize that the damage that came from the suppression requires us to offer them a little more support so that they can have an equal chance.

It was when I thought about "equal chance" that it dawned on me why certain groups work so hard at keeping other groups separate and less than equal. As long as most people don't feel that they deserve as much as I do, then my entitlement to a large part of the resources will be easier to garnish.

I don't have a lot of time today, but I want us all to continue to think and write about personal responsibility, since it is at this level that everything either gets worse or resolves. If I take total responsibility for the slavery in American and I also take full responsibility for allowing myself to be a slave, then I have very little hatred for anyone, but only compassion and understanding.

Mac