Taking Personal Resposibility

Attention All Americans, let’s stop with playing the “blame game” and talk about “personal responsibility”. For decades now, many of us have been blaming others for our misfortunes and our lives not being what we think it should be and to be honest, in the begging, we had a very good case but that all changed, yet we refuse to change with it. We blamed others so often that it became easier to blame others than to take a good hard look at ourselves and accept the part of the blame that fell squarely upon our shoulders. We dismissed our personal responsibilities faster than we leveled the blame at others. It’s time for all of us to grow up, to mature and to clear the way for each and every one of us to become that perfect person God knows us to be. It’s time we stop looking to others to justify how we feel, why we feel that way and what we believe in, it’s time we all stop making excuses for our shortcomings and start to own them before they own us.

In the beginning our excuse for not taking personal responsibility appeared justified because of the clear evidence of the actions of others. Our unemployment numbers remain high because the excuse was, we are not the ones doing the hiring. The achievements gaps were growing because our excuse was we fell for the lie that we were never going to amount to anything. We saw only minimal opportunity to succeed because there was little known about others who looked like us being successful. All of these excuses appeared valid and we were safe in using them to excuse our inaction, our lack of desire and our failure to shed the chains we had placed upon ourselves. The problem is as we matured, grew older, learn how to read, write and think for ourselves, still made the choice to blame instead of take blame for laying down instead of standing up.

In the beginning we learned all about George Washington but very little about the first American killed in the American Revolution by the name of Crispus Attucks. We know all about Tom Brady but how many of us have ever heard of Stanley Morgan, “a four time Pro-Bowler who played 13 seasons for the New England Patriots and is still the team’s all time leader in receptions, yards, touchdowns and yards per catch? How many of us have ever heard of Samuel Jacob Bradford, a Native American who was “drafted by the St. Louis Rams but not before he became the second sophomore to win the Heisman Trophy after leading his team to the record of highest scoring offense in NCAA history as a quarterback”?

There is American History and there is also African-American History, there is American History and there is also Native-American History, there is American History and there is also Hispanic-American History. There are vast amount of knowledge covering all races and nationality of people out there for the learning, if for no other reason than to give some of us the courage to break these chains and rise to the people we know ourselves to be but if we continue to cast all blame at the feet of others and shirk our personal responsibility for our own lives, we shall continue, generation after generation, to be people who take what others will give us instead of possess what we have earned.