--- Nick Arnett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I hear so much self-righteous talk about giving
blame and not enough about forgetting about blame and taking
responsibility.
Nick
But this is absurd. I have no responsibility for the people who crashed planes into the WTC, and I have no responsibility for the ones who just beheaded one of my fellow Americans. I do have a moral responsibility
You chose to apply that to yourself, I didn't. I certainly didn't mean to imply that you were responsible for 9/11 and I'm genuinely curious as to what line of thought led you there.
because of their actions - to make sure that the people who did never, ever get the chance to do it again. But I have no responsibility _for_ their actions. They chose to do what they did.
I'm asking myself what my responsibility is, given that these things happened. For example, I think that as a voter, I have my share of responsibility for anything my country does, good or not. If we're feeding the hungry out of a sense of guilt, that's as inappropriate as abusing Iraqis out of a feeling of blame.
I'm doing my best to reject liberal guilt along with conservative blame, in other words (rejecting conservative guilt and liberal blame come easily to me). I wonder, seriously, if that's what you were hearing.
My problem with the media is that it focuses on who is right and who is wrong, who is winning and who is losing. That's not the purpose of a free press in liberal democracy; I think it arose and continues only by virtue of a historical quirk, a time in which technology opened up extremely limited distribution channels for media.
I think it's naive to believe that big media doesn't ultimately align itself with corporate power, rather than any political agenda.
Self-righteous, it seems to me, might more accurately describe looking at evil and condemning the people who are fighting it as morally inferior to the ones who would rather do nothing about it.
I think your definition is correct. Is that what you heard me saying? It's certainly not what I said when I think it counted the most, to my niece's husband when he got back from the front lines. I told him that I had a hard time supporting the war, but I am very grateful that there are young men like him who are willing to serve. He was among the first Marines into Bagdad and Tikrit, for what it's worth.
Nick
-- Nick Arnett Director, Business Intelligence Services LiveWorld Inc. Phone/fax: (408) 551-0427 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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