Post No. 164: Can One Be Responsible and Irresponsible at the Same Time?

© 2011, the Institute for Applied Common Sense

(Pssshh. This post is about Katie Kouric.)

Earlier today, one of our loyal followers (the Independent Cuss) inquired as to our next topic. Although we suspected that our readers had enough of the subject, we weren’t quite through whipping the dead horse of freedom of political expression (or the Koran burning Rev. Jerry Jones). Therefore we provided some other nuance of the subject to piss off some additional people.

(This post is about Katie Kouric.)

In reality, over the past week we missed our regular viewing of Tom and Jerry cartoons, and AMC did not air enough Three Stooges movie shorts to provide us with a global, historical appreciation of the world and its contents. Consequently, we were at a loss for scintillating, adult-oriented subject matter.

However, the Weather Channel came to the rescue and filled the intellectual void. When one considers that they regularly feature, “How Weather Changed History,” it makes one realize that this underdog channel deserves more of our attention.

(This post is about Katie Kouric.)

A few months back, we generated a piece entitled, As is the Case with the Truth, Personal Responsibility is Rarely Plain, and It’s Never Simple. During many of the comment threads flowing from our posts, it occurred to us that Personal Responsibility means different things to different people.

Some feel that Personal Responsibility is personal to the actor, while others feel that some standard or reference point is established through the collective eyes of a group or through the mouths of the most vocal members of a group. For some others, such as religious sorts, the concept is defined by some higher authority or power. For the liquor manufacturers, it’s about drinking just enough short of embarrassing yourself in some form or fashion.

(Yep, this post is about Katie Kouric.)

When the Institute was based in Los Angeles, on our trips back east people would frequently suggest that they could not live anywhere near the San Andreas Fault. They were concerned that the “Big One” might occur, kill them, and destroy all for which they had worked. We always responded that the “Big One” would probably be only once in a lifetime.

But as we watched the Weather Channel’s coverage of the recent string of storms which swept the southern region of the US, we asked ourselves, "How often does a threat need to appear before a region decides that the risk level is too high to live there on a continuing basis?"

We Baby Boomers can readily recall instances during our youth when residents in purported Third World countries were devastated by various natural forces, and the media always asked how they could return and rebuild year after year following natural devastation. It was a testament to human … something.

(Some have even suggested that we are rapidly approaching our goal of becoming a Third World nation, since we previously attained the status of a “Developed Nation,” and appear to be going in the other direction.)

We here in America historically felt that we were smarter than Nature and that our engineers could figure out a way to win the match. After all, we placed a man on the Moon….
That is until Hurricane Katrina delivered a wallop to the Gulf Coast, and made us look like a bunch of mere mortals. Some suggested that the “responsible thing to do” would be to abandon New Orleans and similarly affected areas.

As we watched the Weather Channel’s coverage of this week’s devastation, particularly in Alabama, it occurred to us: At what point do people, society, and government (oops, and the private sector) decide to shift their efforts to other pursuits and abandon their prior ventures?

How much time should anyone spend pursuing any goal before it becomes the “irresponsible” thing to do? If one does not invest “enough” time or effort, is that person a “quitter?” Do the times dictate or suggest how long anyone should devote their time and energy to any venture? Who decides?

There are only 2 things about which we are absolutely certain in life:

1) Many of our readers have a clear cut, black and white line in their minds as to what is “responsible” and what is “irresponsible;” and

2) This post is about Katie Kouric.

Well, maybe not.

On second thought, this post is about Bill Gates of Microsoft fame, who quit Harvard to go out and pursue his PC dream.