“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” — Ronald Reagan
Saturday morning while listening to Weekend Edition on NPR I heard the host Scott Simon pose a question to a guest commentator, ESPN’s Howard Bryant.
The question was part of an interview about Ray Rice and a judge’s decision allowing Rice to play in the NFL. Near the conclusion of the interview, Simon turned to the Sunday match-up of the Patriots and Packers and asked a question with an unexpected angle.
“I would love to watch Brady v. Rodgers tomorrow, the Patriots versus the Packers, but does anyone who watches the NFL this season, are we aiding and abetting enablers of domestic violence?”
It was a stunningly loaded and irresponsible question posed by the normally steady and non-controversial host of Weekend Edition. I hoped that Howard Bryant was going to refute the premise of the question. After all, who exactly are the enablers of domestic violence at the NFL? By the wording of the question, Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers as well as their two teams were unfairly associated with and lumped in with crimes they had nothing to do with.
You may disagree with the NFL’s handling of the case, but it is a big leap from that to calling the league “enablers of domestic violence”. The absurdity was astounding.
But the premise of the question went unchallenged.
In this country, perhaps we have entered the Age of Enablement. In many major stories we see the casting of blame on an organization, or powerful person or existing “culture” as bearing the guilt of enabling the criminal.
In The Enabler Nation we hold these truths in certain high-profile stories to be self-evident:
1) Roger Goodell must have enabled Ray Rice to know long before he punched his future wife that it would be okay to do so.
2) In Ferguson, Missouri it had to be inherent racism in the officer and the system that enabled him to shoot at a suspect in a robbery who approached his vehicle and assaulted him.
3) At the University of Virginia, as reported in Rolling Stone Magazine, it was the “Rape Culture” and fraternity system that enabled fraternity brothers to allegedly rape a young woman at their fraternity house.
4) The movie Happy Valley, on one side of the issue, offered an argument advanced mostly by a local attorney who stood to profit financially from this narrative; only the Penn State community’s near-religious obsession with football enabled the perpetrator to commit crimes for which he was convicted. Because our community was rooting for its favorite team people weren’t out looking for criminals — which is what all citizens in non-football obsessed towns do with their autumn Saturday afternoons and weekends.
Just to be clear, I do not believe any of the above assertions. But neither am I denying the seriousness of the allegations, or denying that racism or other motivating factors exist in people’s actions. It just shows how unrealistic the arguments can be that are being made (even in cases like the UVA story where the facts have yet to be established). The truth is people commit crimes or take actions of their own free will for which they and they alone are responsible.
It does cause one to wonder how we got here. Could it be that there are civil lawsuits rife with lucrative payouts if a deep-pocketed “enabler” is behind every crime committed? That probably plays a part.
Could it be that the actual story of individual responsibility just may not be enough to create a story worthy of mass-consumption?
We live in the branding-age where name recognition, re-tweets and followers are used to measure relevance and self-worth. Household names attract attention so the Ray Rice story becomes an “NFL problem”, an alleged rape in a fraternity becomes part of the “UVA Rape Culture”. Racism is another powerful driver of discussion in this country so the Ferguson case becomes a strictly “racial” incident rather than a crime story.
The bigger the hook of the story, and there are no two bigger hooks than racism or sex in our country’s news appetite, the more we pay attention. Unfortunately the more we pay attention the more we consume the force-fed narratives (whether truthful or not) designed to inflame anger and outrage at the system, or the biggest names, or some cultural problem.
But it is time to recall the words of Ronald Reagan atop this column. Every deplorable act is the responsibility of the person who commits it. Blaming it on outside forces or enablers only gives us the cover to avoid admitting that we bear a personal responsibility to follow the laws of the land.
Because we have free will in the United States each generation is obligated to teach the next generation right from wrong so they can choose accordingly. Within our souls and minds we harbor the ability to go either way. But the choices that are made are ours and ours alone and that is the understanding that we must pass down.
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