Responsibility...

.... the state or position of being accountable to somebody or for something, the blame for something that has happened, authority to act to make decisions independently …..a duty.

I woke with a dream after the first debates. I was struck with the word “responsibility”.

This word inside my head played itself out in various scenarios. Starting first with the obvious , others not taking responsibility. There is so much frustration and the anger all over the world. Now it is in our back yard in a way we can't ignore. So how do we change all of this?

I watched a scene from the TV show Mad Men and was mesmerized with the immense selfishness and entitlement we all possess. Don takes his family to a park for a picnic just after he has bought the new car. He’s concerned about his car getting dirty on the inside from his kids. In preparation to leave the park, the camera man pulls back to a wide shot of the family picking up the blankets and shaking them out. They conveniently leave behind all the trash. Chinett napkins and Dixi cups scatter in the wind. That action and the obliviousness of the whole family to not seeing their mess and taking responsibility to pick it up, spoke volumes to the emotional life of not just the family but the era. The unconscious mental murmur of somebody else will clean up my mess.

It’s like the image I have stuck in my head of GW Bush on Letterman during his first run for the Presidency. The show was going to commercial and instead of moving right way, the camera lingered on Bush. A page, sent to reset Dave’s desk passes in front of Bush. GW Bush unabashedly reached up, grabbed the edge of her sweater and cleaned his glasses with it.

We are going to see things in the next few months that no one will have predicted , not even a good psychic, but we can feel them already.

Unless I take full responsibility for me and what I do, then I can’t change anything. Clearly we see this with our elected officials and the news media but why not start at home. A personal act of responsibility would be to deal with your own garbage, clean up your own mess, and stop blaming others.

So I guess we do have the whole world in our hands.