In January, an appeals court in Newark, N.J., reinstated Doris Sexton's worker-compensation lawsuit against a county-owned nursing home where Sexton had claimed that breathing a co-worker's perfume one day in 2004 had made her permanently disabled and tethered to an oxygen tank. A lower court had decided that it was far more likely that her disability was caused by Sexton's 43-year, pack-a-day cigarette habit than by the brief exposure to perfume. [New York Daily News-AP, 1-9-09]
What has happened, when people are compelled to blame others for everything that happens to them? We laugh when we hear of lawsuits like this, and the famous McDonald's coffee case, but the sad fact is that every injury and every difficulty has become an opportunity to blame somebody else. The psychological terms are "external locus of responsibility" and "external locus of control." In other words, everything about one's circumstances is caused by somebody else, and there is nothing that he can do about it (except file a lawsuit, apparently).
What happened to the ideas of duty and personal responsibility? Many other nations demand mandatory military service of all 18-year-old men – neither a draft nor "selective service," but a 2- to 4-year enlistment, in order to instill these ideas in their next generations. Would this work in America? I think that it would be as effective to legislate that all blind people are now required to see.
And if you disagree with me, let me know. We'll file a class action lawsuit against Blogger, for allowing such things to be posted.
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