Just What I’ve Been Sayin’ …

Posted on by under education, Environmental Issues, History, Re-blogs, Social commentary

You’ve all heard me say more than a few times that for every ‘right’, there is an accompanying responsibility.  Of late, my pet peeve has been people’s claim to various ‘rights’ such as freedom of speech under the 1st Amendment, or the ‘right’ to own a gun as covered by the 2nd Amendment, but they don’t accept the responsibility to use that speech or that gun responsibly so that it doesn’t cause harm to others. I’ve long said that your rights end where they step on my toes.  When I saw Dr. John Persico’s post first thing this morning, I said, “BINGO!!!”  He is spot-on and I think (most of) you will agree.  Thank you, John, for this excellent reminder …

How About a List of Responsibilities?

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28 thoughts on “Just What I’ve Been Sayin’ …”

  1. I have just been asked to write down the roles and responsibilities of various people in a Charity I volunteer for. It comes at the tail end of a huge piece of work we have been doing to clarify and write down a lot of stuff that had just ‘grown’ with an attitude of ‘we are all nice people so we don’t need rules or written agreements’ until, of course, someone joined who took but didn’t want to give. It has been an interesting exercise for me and the responsibilities list is longer than the rights one!

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    • I think that’s a great thing to do! It would be nice if we all followed our consciences and always did the right thing, but … as we both know, human nature is not always nice and does not always play by the rules.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. Not to beat a dead horse, but we need to see and hear the absolute barbarity of this unnecessary situation. Remember we’re talking about civilians here, not combatants.

    CAIRO — Despite his experience as an orthopedic surgeon, Hany Bsaiso froze when he saw his teenage niece’s injuries. Her right leg, he said, had been blown off below the knee by an Israeli tank shell. The other was severely injured.
    “Where do I start?” he recalled thinking to himself. “I had no anesthesia. I had nothing.”
    The area of the family home — just a five-minute drive from Gaza City’s main al-Shifa Hospital — was thick with Israeli forces. It was not safe to move.

    This is what the Palestinian doctors and the poor wounded people are dealing with….and you can’t say a word about it or you’re antisemitic, period.

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    • I saw that earlier in The Washington Post and it broke my heart. Yes, you are so right … in this situation, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I am not anti-semitic … my father was Jewish, in fact. I support the people of Israel and I also support the Palestinians in Gaza. I do NOT support Benjamin Netanyahu or Hamas.

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      • Netanyahu is a war criminal now, no matter how the Biden people try and soft pedal what they are doing, it;’s plain to anyone with eyes and a brain that he needs to be removed from office and tried for his war crimes. I am sure there are others but when such large volumes of ISRAELIS both in Israel AND the United States stand against their own government for the senseless slaughter of Palestinians you know there’s a major problem that needs to be confronted.

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        • Oh yes, I fully agree that he is a war criminal and that he should NOT be the leader of Israel. But, it isn’t up to Biden to remove him, but rather the Israeli people … and I suspect they will at some point, since the majority of them no longer support him. I was surprised when he got back into office and still wonder if there was some underhandedness in that.

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  5. Freedom of speech…..that’s funny. You big funny girl!

    There is simply no such thing as FOS. Oh, wait, if you are agreeing with virtually EVERYONE else in the world, well then, sure, let’s celebrate FOS. Unfortunately if you are not, well take a look at the evidence.

    Remember Colin Kaeperneck for instance? Where was HIS FOS when he protested the grotesque and brutal treatment of African Americas – adults and children alike – by American law enforcement by “taking a knee” during the national anthem at a football game. It cost him his living, his profession; a lifetime he had been dreaming of and working towards almost his entire life. Freedom of Speech? I think not.

    How about Cong. Rashida Tlaib? A PALESTINIAN woman and member of Congress that had the temerity to speak out against Israel’s inhumane – and now, genocidal – treatment of innocent Palestinian men, woman, and children, of which she is the ONLY member of Congress. 22,000 DEAD and counting, everyday, with 6-8000 CHILDREN in early graves. One cannot even speak up – AT ALL – about anything that doesn’t sing Israel’s praises without being labeled “antisemitic”. Repugs wanted to drive her from Congress completely! Where’s the phony baloney “freedom of speech” in this? There isn’t any, that’s where.

    I have never been an antisemite; I grew up in NY with hundreds of Jewish friends, and I still count among my closest and best friends people of Jewish persuasion. I am without question a supporter of the state of Israel; always have been. What I am not is blind. I don’t care what you or anyone else wants to call it, when one of the most sophisticated and US-supplied advanced armies marches into the virtual hellhole that the local population has been corralled into because the borders of the two state solution continues to be eroded unilaterally by Israel with American “complicity” (their endless repugnant silence says it all) I call it what it is. Israel lost 16,00 innocent lives, a terrible and senseless tragedy caused by a terrorist group, NOT the civilians of Palestine. There’s the HUGE, unmistakable difference and the primary dichotomy between the deaths of the Israelis and the deaths of innocent, unarmed Palestinians. By the way, a recent article in the Guardian say that 2 MOTHERS are killed EVERYDAY in Gaza. And we shouldn’t be able to speak out against anything of which we are morally and conscientiously opposed without recrimination? That is not freedom, that’s “conservative freedom” similar to a woman’s right to her own healthcare decisions and the “freeing” of people from their rights to vote. Nothing but lip service.

    As a result I have decided that I cannot in good conscience vote for Joe Biden in this election due to his and the Dumos lilly-livered and spineless deference to the criminal behavior of Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet. Biden has blood up to his shoulders in this disgusting acceptance of what can only be called Israel’s criminal behavior. Would he have been this quiet if the shoe were on the other foot? I think we all know the answer to that.

    But I ask again, where was her FOS to simply speak out agains the senseless slaughter of her own people?

    She had none.

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  7. You kind of say this when you mention “stepping on toes”, but along with rights and responsibilities I think respect needs to be added. I came to the conclusion many years ago that humans need to be self-responsible in how they treat other humans, other living beings including plants, and also the world around us (the environment.) We are more likely ro be responsible if we feel respect for those same beings and things.
    I do not need anyone telling me how to live, act, speak, etc. as long as I am responsible for my actions and show respect for everyone and everything around me.
    Unfortunately, as I grow older, I have found there are some people I cannot respect, no matter what — Trump, Putin, Netan’yahoo, as examples.They show no respect for anyone they do not know personally, and probably a lot of people they do know personally. In fact, I don’t even know that they can be called human!

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    • Agreed … without respect, we cannot live in peace together, and that is one of the things missing in much of the world today, particularly here in the U.S., but also most everywhere I look. Thing is, though … true respect cannot be legislated or enforced … you either respect the environment, your neighbors, educators, the cashiers at the grocery store, etc., or you don’t. But responsibility CAN be legislated … you can stop John Doe from shooting people by having and enforcing laws. But you cannot force him to actually feel respect toward other people.

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      • I hate to break it to you, Jill, but you cannot legislate criminal acts either, except to punish. And punishment works about as well as doing
        nothing. Let me ask you, do you not shoot people because there is a law against it, or because you know inside you it is not a good thing to do. Murders happen every day, committed by people with no respect for others, but also no respect for the law. The law makes it possible to punish lawbreakers, but even there we see double standards all the time. If Trump shot and killed soneone on Fifth Avenue, would he be punished? Possibly, but likely not. All he has to say is the person tnought the person threatened him, and he fired in self-defence. He would be believed before you or I would be believed.

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        • I haven’t shot anyone because I don’t believe killing is right, but … BUT … that doesn’t mean that others haven’t refrained from it because they didn’t want to spend the rest of their life in prison. I think that for some portion of the populace, laws and the threat of prison ARE a deterrent. Not for all, obviously, but for some.

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          • In my pretty vast experience in the world, I have met very few people who don’t do a thing because it might end them up in jail — or worse. Either people have a sense of right and wrong, or they don’t. And even then people who know what’s right choose to do wrong under stressful circumstances.
            Legislators may say they are trying to tell people what things aren’t good to do, they msy even believe that is what they are doing, but they are not always right (Banning abortion! Allowing guns!). hat they are doing is legalizing the right for them to do wrong! It is okay for them to kidnap (arrest) people, hold them against their will (imprison them), and sometime even murder them (give them a death sentence!).. That is the real use of the law.

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            • Y’know … when you asked the question yesterday about shooting someone, the answer was easy for me … of course I would never shoot someone, laws or no laws. But, reading your comment here now, there are things I would do that I don’t do because they are against the law. One very simple one … I wouldn’t necessarily follow all the speed limits on the highways, but for that it is illegal not to. I might be tempted not to pay taxes, especially now when I see what a circus act our Congress has become, but it’s the law, so I do it. And in most cases, I do believe the laws are there to protect people. Lately, a number of laws have been put into effect that do more harm than good, such as the abortion bans, voter disenfranchisement laws, book bans, etc., but those are still an anomaly.

              Now please don’t tell me that you go along with the Republicans saying that the January 6th insurrectionists who are serving time in prison are ‘hostages’!!! They are right where they belong, and frankly if I were a judge, they would have gotten much longer sentences!

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                • I have to ask this … and I know we’ve had this discussion before … if you don’t believe in prisons, how would you propose to stop a serial killer who has already killed many people and has no intention of stopping? Or what would you do with … say a man who shot 20 kids in an elementary school? Would you let him remain in society?

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                  • I won’t answrr those questions directly, because those kind of people are products of our societies. What I will say is prisons punish, and turn most inmates into worse people than they ever might hsve been. There is no real attempt at helping a person become better people. Inmates are treated worse than dogs, and unless they really want to help themselves, no one else is going to.
                    People who don’t end up in jail (it is so easy to be railroaded especially if you are a person of coloue) have no real way of knowing what goes on inside them. All I got was a taste, but it was enough to let me know I never wanted to go back. Did it stop me from breaking laws? Not at first. It just msde me be more cautious, more intelligent about how I did things. The cops knew I was still bresking laws but they couldn’t cstch me, though they tried. Eventually I chsnged my lifestyle. I never went straight, but I stopped needing to make money illegally.
                    Now I am out of the game, have been for slmost 50 years. But if it became necessary to restart that life, I would have no qualms about doing it. I live the way I choose to live. No one can stop me from being me.

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                    • But you don’t answer my question. I’m really curious to know how you would ensure that the person who shot children in school would never do so again. I might agree that prisons are not the ideal solution, but I don’t know if there IS an ideal solution … I certainly don’t have one. But I know I don’t want to live in a lawless society where mass murderers are given free rein to walk into a school or grocery store and kill people, then do the same thing tomorrow … and the next day. If humans were perfect, then no, we wouldn’t need prisons. But they aren’t.

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                    • A lack of prisons does not a lawless society make. People such as those would still give up their literal freedom, but they would still be allowed to interact in nornal society. How that would happen probably hadn’t been perfected yet — it would take more than an unremoveable ankke bracelet being tracked 24 hours a day.
                      But necessity is the mother of invention, and if we made our societies prisonless someone would invent ways to stop people with such tendencies from acting out.
                      As I have said before, Jill, I am just an idea man. I imagine the world as I would like to live in it. I don’t have the practical skills to create that world, but I know there are people out there who can.
                      Cutting someone out of normal society is cruel and unusual punishment, especially if this goes on for years and sometines lifetimes. Humans need to be able to interact with good people in order to improve themselves. By putting all the bad acters in one place, you are creating the scenario to make bad-acting people even worse. By cutting them out of society you are creating more monsters.
                      I understand your fears, but an eye for an eye has never been a workable solution. The thing to do is to prevent these situations before they ever happen. Mass murders are possible only because the weapons to commit them are freely available. Instead of locking up one person, make it impossible fir all persons to do such heinous things. It’s too late for the USA, because you have all your gun freaks and politicians who have no interest in creating a safe society. This is where you have to start. Get rid of guns, prevent poverty, don’t alienate those who don’t fit in. Provide everyone with ALL the necessities of life so they don’t have to go out and hurt others in order to feel like they aren’t being alienated in some way.
                      I gotta go now, but I just want to say we presently create the situations that make people feel they gave to go out with a bang. We are the ones responsible for allowing people to become mass murderers. We are the ones who need to start the change!
                      But we’ll never do it without a lot of hard work, given what we gave done in the past!

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  8. This was my comment Jill, over on John’s post…

    And John, I would like to add to that Google Search and subsequent list, this critical point:

    • A thorough, demonstrated understanding, over time of an American lifetime… of “E Pluribus Unum.”

    This concept, this civic virtue, poorly understood or appreciated these days in this nation, certainly crosses over into responsible Public Health & Safety and doing your part as part of a team, a nation. Period!

    John, I stopped by here to read from Jill’s blog Filosofa’s Word and I’m so glad I did. This is poignant. This is so spot-on! These concepts are critical to the social fabric of this country which is being distorted and lost by disinformation, lies, and partisan tunnel-vision. The latter of those three is what I imply with E Pluribus Unum.

    Excellent post Sir. Bravo!

    Dr. Persico, Jr. is indeed spot-on! 🎯 Great share Jill!

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    • Yes, I found him to be spot-on, too! And your comment also hits the nail on the head. We, as a nation, seem to have lost the concept of E Pluribus Unum … Out of many, one. The question I ask is whether we can ever recover and reverse course from where we are today? Or is this only the beginning? I have my doubts, human nature being what it is. Glad you enjoyed John’s post!

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