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Our parents would and should be ashamed. Their children are slothful, uncaring, self-absorbed, sniveling, fat babies incapable of taking responsibility for their own lives. It's my generation and I ought to know. If our marriages fail ...we run back home. If our schooling is done...we run back home. If our businesses fail...we run back home. If life doesn't work out the way we would hope we rap ourselves up in a pill bottle and blame it on a "disease". When life isn't perfect we drown ourselves in liquor and blame our parents for disciplining us to sharply.

And OUR kids are paying the penalty:

• We don't discipline them.
  
• We don't teach them discipline.
  
• We don't require they accomplish anything.
  
• We don't ask them to help at home.
  
• We don't teach the value of hard work.
  
• Or the value of a dollar.
  
• Or the worth of a person
  
• We don't teach them to save.
  
• We don't teach them the correct way to treat women
  
• or treat men
  
• We don't teach boys the secrets of being honorable men.
  
• We don't teach our girls to act like young ladies.
  
• We don't teach them to be on time.
  
• We don't teach them to care for themselves.
  

The list can go on and on. But the short and the long of it is.....we don't take personal responsibility for anything. Is it any wonder that our children are failing miserably at school no matter how much we dumb down the material and water down the curriculum. We've laid the responsibility for teaching our family values at the feet of the local school board and then cry foul when they try to teach them to be a responsible citizen. We have abdicated our responsibility as parents and as children to our neighbors, child care centers, nursing homes, school boards, coaches, and local, state and federal governments. We don't take care of our aging population. We send them away and maybe, just maybe...we visit them.

It isn't our fault. We can't help ourselves.We have been ingrained for too long with our own sense that we are the most important people in the world. We were fortunate enough to live in an era when the hard work of those that came before us made our life infinitely easier and have convinced ourselves we deserve it. We know we haven't earned it. But dog-gone we deserve it.

I work in a call center for a major company. My job requires that I talk with many people who for one reason or another their account has cancelled. No one is perfect that's for sure and no company is perfect either. But my company believes if we have made a mistake we better make it right. They understand the meaning of corporate and personal responsibility. They practice it and they require the same of me. It truly is what makes them a leader in the their industry.

I also talk to people on a regular basis for whom an account has cancelled due to their own negligence. One man I recently talked to claimed that it was my responsibility to make sure the forms we needed signed were signed and that he filled them out correctly. After contacting him no less than five times by mail and sending 5 emails and calling him once he failed to respond with the signatures required and it was our fault. His reasoning? He gets 500 pieces of mail a day and can't be held responsible to read our requests. You should know he signed it and sent it back, he just didn't read it. Just above his signature we the instructions for correctly filling out the form. He failed to fill in the information necessary to correctly record his account. Which in the end cost him more money.

Unless we reign ourselves in and start accepting personal responsibility, not just for our mistakes, but for all our actions, good and bad, we are doomed as a generation. More than that we have doomed the next generation to an even worse fate and so it grows exponentially. My hope is that we understand we created the mess and it is our responsibility to correct it. I've said my piece.

These are, after all, the musings of a mind that wanders.