Individual Responsibility

How is it that everyone can have the right idea, and the world can still be going to pot? Everywhere you go(almost) you can find people who have a good grasp of the problems and know what to do about them. Despite what many people say, the majority of Americans are not stupid people, so why are there all these stupid mistakes being made.

We've all heard talk of apathy, we've all seen it in action, and -though I doubt we'd like to admit it- we've all felt its grip in our lives to some extent. In big communities, in this case the community being America, it's easy to convince ourselves that somebody else will do something about the community's problems; or we think we're only a small part of the community and thus whatever responsibility we have for the problem is not substantial enough to warrant any restorative action.

I'm sure we've all heard fund raisers and pledge drives. You know how they always talk about, 'we need your pledge to make our goal' and 'only you make this possible'. We tend to dismiss that, but despite being an overly used pledge drive line, it's got some truth in it. Look at it this way, if you have a goal of, say a thousand votes, and after however long you get exactly a thousand votes. If only one of those voters had voted, then you wouldn't have hit your mark, it doesn't matter if it was the first voter or the 600th voter that didn't vote, you wouldn't have reached your mark.

It doesn't matter how big the community is, the responsibility for the issues fall entirely on all of our shoulders. It's not some mathematical equation where you can go, 'well, responsibility factor is 100 and there are 1000 people so everyone is only .1 percent responsible.'. It doesn't work like that, we all have a part to play, and all of our parts are vital, the difference between fixing the problem or not. We are a not responsible as a community, we as individuals, are responsible for our community's problems. Apathy is not a problem of community, it's a problem of the individual.

-Joshua Shillingworth