Just about everyone speaks in favor of responsibility, but many people do not understand what responsibility means. Responsibility does not mean having a Hummer and a huge house. It means leaving the world a better place than you found it.
And the people who have left the world a worse place than they found it have no business talking about responsibility.
What these people are advocating is not only wrong; it is precisely wrong. It is the opposite of what needs to be done. We are facing all sorts of major problems. These problems require our undivided attention. If all people are doing is “tending to their garden” then these problems do not get solved, and all the gardens go underwater.
Two related claims by many of these people is that they have Christian values or family values. They do not. A Christian will not be destroying what God has created and what he cannot re-create. A person who has family values will not be bequeathing his children a ruined world. Instead a person with Christian values or family values will do everything in his power that the world he bequeathes to his children is better than what he has found.
At this point some would say that I am dangerous or grandiose. I hope to be dangerous to such attitudes; I hope that more people be dangerous to such attitudes. As for being “grandiose,” that would include most of the world's major contributors. I see absolutely no problem in such a thing. In many cases it is precisely the right way to go.
I do not want my daughter to inherit a toxic hell. Nor do I want her to inherit a toxic society in which her two options are being knocked around by some jerk or being abused by feminists for being kind and pretty. All of these problems are solvable. However they will not be solved by “positive thinking” or anything of the sort. They will be solved by informed, directed action.
Doing that, is the true definition of responsibility.