Skip to main content

What Potholes and Avoidable Car Accidents Suggest About Modern Generations

The Millennial generation can be aptly summarized by the occasional event witnessed along local thoroughfares and across numerous YouTube channels: the motorist who casually drives his or her 7-year-financed car into another vehicle, despite having noticed that other vehicle with more than sufficient time to brake and avoid striking it, only to stubbornly blame the other driver for getting in his or her way. 

The contemporary zeitgeist contends that there is always somebody else to blame. 

Taking personal responsibility appears to be a relic of a time gone by, seldom serving the generation which has grown so widely accustomed to an institutional or systematic solution to every identifiable or imaginable problem. 

In this case, whether it is a driver who has suddenly turned into traffic or another who has driven through a stop sign or passed through a red light, the motorist is always best served by exercising his or her own judgment to avoid danger, instead of thoughtlessly, unquestioningly and faithfully depending on the dictates of law. 

Though the other motorist may have been wrong under the eyes of the law, and though you may have palpably delivered the point that you indeed had the right of way, reliance upon that defense can protect neither you nor your family at the time of impact, whereupon any posthumous judgment in your favor can achieve little to nothing by way of repairing the trauma or recovering the lives of those lost.

This leads to motorists driving over potholes instead of driving around them, drivers slamming into others on principle in order to make a point, and residents tolerating potholes and other obstructions instead of repairing them themselves. 



Governments and laws cannot solve your problems, nor can they reconcile each of those which plague this world. 

They can, however, absolve the individual of his personal responsibilities, and they have demonstrably proven to achieve this end across the domains of health, employment, commerce, education, household budgeting, planning for the future, conflict resolution, self-defense, and general self-sufficiency and independence.  

In each of these cases, the best that we can do is to assume responsibility over ourselves and our actions, to defend ourselves, promote our interests and incidentally set the standard for others to follow.

Government cannot solve our problems; they can only collectivize and compound them en route to reducing liberty and repossessing the impetus for individuals to independently identify and navigate them themselves. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fischer: Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse (featuring the Morals of Chess by Benjamin Franklin)

Buy your copy today of  Fischer: Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse (featuring the Morals of Chess by Benjamin Franklin) , available at  Amazon  and Barnes & Noble . The name Bobby Fischer reigns supreme in the world of chess, yet there was a time when it hogged headlines, struck fear into the eyes of the competition, and was on the lips of folks all across the globe. More than the face of the centuries-old game, there was a time when Bobby Fischer was synonymous with the cause and spirit of America, that his moves on the chessboard sought more than checkmate but to pit the strength of “raw-boned American individualism” against “the Soviet megalithic system” which had come to dominate the game of chess at the same time it dominated Cold War politics. Fischer’s triumph over the USSR's Boris Spassky in the ’72 World Chess Championship would ultimately be celebrated as a symbolic and diplomatic victory for the U.S., but, as time would tell, it would not mean the American...

The Deal with Tariffs

Over the course of President Trump’s two terms, there has been much talk around the matter of tariffs — taxes on imported goods. However, much of the talk seems to miss the point. After all, for those of us who seek the truth, it’s not really a question of whether tariffs are ‘good’ but whether they are preferable to other kinds of taxes — assuming, of course, that taxes are the rule, as certain as the eventuality of death. First, let’s establish the theory: beyond the generic purpose of revenue generation for the state, the institution of tariffs ordinarily serves to  reduce (or discourage) imports by making them artificially more expensive, while encouraging domestic production by making domestic products more appealing on a relative price basis. In the realm of foreign affairs, tariffs are instituted or threatened in the course of international trade negotiations in order to signal dissatisfaction with existing trade barriers and to push for more favorable trade terms; or in ord...

From BC to AD to AI

Artificial intelligence is bound not only to render the ordinary human being boring by comparison, and in many cases practically unnecessary, but to dispose human beings to hostility toward each other where any dares pose a question or raise a concern instead of taking it up with a chatbot (or AI interface); such a course of action eventually assuming such a regular place in human affairs as to stand in entirely for human discourse and daily interaction.  This is not only a very real possibility when considering the future course of human ‘civilization’; it is more than likely imminent or already upon us.  It is left to be seen just what this will look like, just how this will play out, just what tolerance the species (and even beyond) has for such extremes which this technology is to bring about. Likewise, it remains to be seen whether a heavily-indebted society facing never-ending and unavoidable taxes (i.e. taxes on property) can even be expected to retrain and retool for t...