Most Florida Gulf Coast University students are (hopefully) aware of the alleged alcohol problem on and around campus. There was a student who died of alcohol poisoning last semester, and a more recent fatality in August involving an intoxicated female returning home from a off-campus party. The two students who hosted the party were charged with a misdemeanor and sentences to six months probation. The two students had never met the girl, nor did they invite her to the party. This tragic situation is perfect example of the lack of responsibility our society renders on the individual.
Our society has adopted the “it’s someone else’s fault” attitude, so, there must be someone to blame besides a teenage girl who drank to much, got behind the wheel of a car, endangered the lives of other drivers, and unfortunately caused her own death. And, there must be someone else to blame besides two young men who hosted a party where alcohol was distributed without a clear knowledge of who would be consuming it, and the level of sobriety of each guest upon departure from the party.
Who is to blame? Let’s blame the college experience. Heck, let’s blame the college. Better yet, let’s blame the parents for not instilling moral values in their children. Let’s blame Anheuser-Bush! Should we blame ourselves? …just a question.
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19 comments:
While I agree that not enough blame is allocated to the individual in these types of situations, I do disagree on one point. If you are going to throw a party, you are taking on the liability, and the responsibility of making sure people aren't leaving your party three sheets to the wind. I know this can be difficult with fifty plus people at your house, but it is your house, and it is your responsibility to know who is there. Now, if the students had been charged with a criminal offense I would say that's getting out of hand, but it would be reckless on the District Attorney's part to simply let it slide by.
Bravo, Heather! You’ve hit on the all too pervasive problem in society today: a rabid
aversion to taking responsibility. No one likes to be wrong, yet there are times when
the best thing to do is fess up to our mistakes and accept the consequences of our
actions.
My dad always told my brothers and me when we were young that “You aren’t really an adult until you learn to take responsibility.”
If that’s the case, America is chock full of finger-pointing adolescents, squabbling
about who broke Mom’s best vase, and unloading their problems on others; undoubtedly doing more hurt than good.
To err is human and all that, but we must be (hu)man enough to accept the price of our decisions, even if it means that the price is our life.
I’m not going to blame myself. Just because the two students didn’t invite the girl to the party doesn’t mean they aren’t responsible. It’s their house and they are the ones responsible for what happens there.
When I was in high school a classmate got drunk, drove home, and fall asleep behind the wheel-killing a five year old boy. The house in which the alcohol was consumed by the minor was sued. They had to go through court and weren’t even home the night it all happened.
A party should have rules. In the local story, the girl might not have been invited but she wasn’t kicked out. But I’m sure they didn’t force her to drink it either. She was over the age of 18 and therefore considered an adult. Situations like this are difficult. Every one will blame anyone except themselves.
I definitely advocate personal responsibility. The two boys who were charged with a misdemeanor for serving alcohol to minors are being held responsible for their personal actions. Both of the mentioned fatalities occurred because the drinker made an irresponsible choice. Buying alcohol and serving it at a party when you know minors are around-- even if you don’t know them personally--is also an irresponsible choice. You can’t throw a party, have a table chock-full of booze, and hope to god that nothing bad happens. If that is your game plan, you had better be ready when the shit hits the proverbial fan. I agree that passing the blame buck off on abstractions (i.e. “the media” and “the college experience”) serves no purpose. On the other hand, placing a (proportionate) degree of blame on those who played a tangible role in the problem may make the rest of us think twice about our own role in a regulated-drinking culture.
Not to be cold bloodied about it, but isn’t it ultimately the choice of the drinker to get behind the wheel of a car, endanger the lives of others and potentially cause their own death? Yes the age of the unfortunate student is tragically young but wasn’t she still an adult? Would the tragedy be any less diminished had the student been older? If either of these incidents had involved faculty or staff members would we be talking about placing blame on anyone other than them? It is assumed that young adults attending university have knowledge and an awareness of the dangers of drinking to obnoxious excess as well as choosing to drive once they’ve done so. Is this a societal issue or simply a part of one’s personal responsibility? Much better I think to speak of choice, not blame. Blame is too armchair quarterbacking for me. Blame is passive. It’s so very after the fact. It’s for those media hounds out to make a name for themselves in front of the media. Choice is about us (hopefully) making a conscious, educated decision In That Moment to not do something fatal to others or to ourselves. Rather than debate whom should get the blame (and no doubt there is plenty to get passed onto individuals named and not named in criminal documents) I say lets learn from the unfortunate choices these young people made. And let us not repeat their mistakes.
It is unfortunate that no one in particular will take the blame for what happened, except for those on which blame is being un-wantingly bestowed. The girl that died was my cousin’s ex-girlfriend. They broke up recently because they were going to different school. Maybe blame could be put on him? If they stayed together she wouldn’t have been in that situation, and therefore would most likely still be alive. Responsibility has become something of the past. The concept of responsibility is one that many people don’t fully understand and it is this lack of understanding that leads to tragic accidents. Perhaps future generations will come to the realization that they need to get it together for their own sake.
I could not agree more with trying to find someone, or something, to blame. When I was a freshman I was fortunate to have not one, but two alcohol violations attached to my record. On the first occasion I remember the RD asking for my parents' phone number so he could contact them and make them aware of the situation. I told him they wouldn't care because I was the one paying for my college experience, so I should have been held accountable. He argued with me about this, and told me that he needed to make them aware of the situation. When he called my parents,my father laughed at him, which made the situation worse. My father asked the RD why he felt the need to call him and tell him. My father also told the RF that I should be held responsible and that he needed to speak to me, not him. I was willing to take responsibility, yet it was almost impossible. I think this is the problem with society. I think there are people willing to be held responsible, yet everyone around them tries to point the finger in a different direction, making it easy for them to dodge out of the blame.
The girl who died should be blamed considering she decided to consume as many drinks
as she did. I know somewhere in her higher education career she heard about alcohol poisoning and the effects of alcohol to a person. Why should the two students who distributed alcohol at their party be blamed? They
did not invite her to the party. She decided to drink too many drinks and decided that consuming a little bit more of alcohol was more important than her life.
I do agree that our society always wants to blame someone else, but the problem is that the person who should be blamed is overlooked and rarely ever blamed. Parents, college officials and friends can only do so much. The result of drinking too much alcohol should be blamed on the individual that decided to drink one more drink regardless if they end up dead or not.
Does it perhaps help in the grieving process to blame someone? Does it make us feel
better to know that our deceased loved one was wrongfully killed? I think not. But we
all do it. No one wants to take responsibility for their actions, especially in a case
as serious as this. In my opinion, the only person that can be blamed is the underage
girl who drank too much and drove off thinking she was invincible. She did not think
of anyone but herself, and therefore, I feel she is the one to blame. She is to blame
for her death, for others injured in the accident, for the grief that her family feels
and for the heartbreak her friends experience when they pull out old yearbooks and
photographs… It is very fortunate that she collided with a tree, and not with another
vehicle, or she would have had far more blame.
Still, if we do not learn from her story (not to mention the hundreds of thousands of
similar stories we hear every year), then perhaps one day the blame buck will
rightfully rest on us…
There aren't many people in this world who are willing to enter a situation if they know there is great potential for a negative outcome. I'm certainly guilty of dodging blame at times. If I don't feel like going to work, I blame it on my car "not starting" and delay the process as much as I can. If I don't feel like talking to someone, I silence my phone and blame it on my lack of time.
Sadly, that's just the way the world has become. That is the attitude we have come to mirror. In this specific case, it's hard to get involved in the blame game because nobody is really the sole culprit. It's the young woman's fault for getting behind the wheel, it's the two boys fault for hosting that party without recognizing the potential damages that could be done and it is the fault of all the individuals who attended the party for not helping this girl get home.
To answer the question, we are to blame. Every day we all take part in some sort of selfish act that directly reflects this concept. The more we act like this, the more normal it becomes. It's now just too late for a change.
"The fox condemns the trap, not himself."-William Blake's "Proverbs of hell"
Blake's quote perfectly sums up Heather's musings on society's lack of personal responsibility. In the case of the alcohol–related fatalities at FGCU, "the trap" of underage or otherwise reckless drinking often results in mudslinging to defend the "victim's" decisions.
With scapegoats taking precedence over solutions, we cannot see how to fix a problem through the cloud of condemnable fault. As Heather puts it, this will only lead to "Should we blame ourselves?" Well, why not? I never knew the student in question, but if I had, would I have been able to prevent the tragedy? This seems harsh but I wouldn't expect anyone else to be responsible for my actions.
Everyone just needs to take responsibility for their own decisions.
Those boys didn’t make her get in the car drunk to drive home. It is just
as much their fault as it is Anheuser- Busch for producing the beer. The
girl showed up to a party she wasn’t actually invited to, got shwasted, and
decided to get behind the wheel. That is no one else’s fault but her own.
Not her parents, not the media, hers. That is almost like saying the
roommates of the boy who died in Mangrove Hall from alcohol poisoning
should be charged with his death. Since they lived there and all. Well, I lived in Mangrove hall the time of his death, so it's probably my fault, somehow, too.
Two-story tall beer bong races and beer pong tournaments and pub crawls, shots-around-the-world parties, toga parties and drinking-every-time-Cheney-blinks-during-the-SOTU-address parties, St. Patrick’s Day, New Year’s Eve and Super Bowl Sunday; these are the social events, games and holidays that college students live for. Or are they? Binge drinking is viewed as a widespread college problem. Young adults, not even of age to legally drink, are engaging in extremely risky behavior. They are leaving themselves vulnerable to assault and rape, endangering the lives of others by getting behind the wheel, and, at the very least, making drunken fools of themselves. The image of a frat boy unknowingly showing up to class with permanent marker penises scribbled all over his face comes to mind. Still, this problem isn’t as widespread as it may seem. Ask some of these heavy drinkers how much of the student body drinks like they do and they might tell you that everyone they know parties. Work hard, play hard, right? The fact is that they would be wrong.
While attending the University of Central Florida, I took a course called “REACH Peer Education,” a course designed to inform the student body of physical and mental health issues at the university level. The class was composed entirely of sorority and fraternity members who signed up for an easy A. Everyone thought that most of the student body binge drank regularly. As we soon learned, the truth was a little uglier; the members of the social organizations we represented were the binge drinkers. As a whole, less than twenty percent of the university regularly drank at all. The rest were busy getting an education.
Choices
An epidemic has spread throughout the world and it is called the blame game for drinking and driving. There is no cure for this disease that comes in a bottle. The only cure is to look inside oneself and take responsibility for ones actions. Thousands of people die every year because the keys that dangled from your drinking buddy’s hands never got taken away. “It wasn’t my fault though, it was their choice.” Well, did they really have that choice while they were belligerently intoxicated? I would have to go with “No,” but you do have that choice. If you don’t want to see your buddy next time being lowered into gravesite along with an innocent family that he hit along the way, then I suggest you take the initiative and either drive you friends home or take their keys away. Just think you may have just saved lives and not even realized it. If for some reason you are selfish and really don’t care about others, then just know this, you could be liable. So, in other words you may want to get used to the idea of living in an 8x8 cell, where your roommate thinks you’re cute because that’s where you could be spending a whole lot of time.
The question of blaming oneself is a tricky one. Saying yes to such a question presupposes that we as students/ people are responsible for the actions of another; and having that responsibility opens up the floor for countless moral questions and shades of gray.
One could look at the “college experience” as a source of blame when it comes to alcohol and responsibility- but that particular brand of blame only holds up for so long. The college experience is merely an example of cultural behavior being mirrored and adopted into student society; which in turn marches only slightly behind larger society as a whole. I think it would be beneficial to look at the sources behind this prevailing attitude of alcohol, such as advertising and movies that covertly seek to instill and equate a sense of identity within the consumer. After all, both are in the same business of making money by creating cultural need.
I don’t like people who refuse to accept personal responsibility. But I acknowledge extraneous factors impact the outcome of situations. I believe in age appropriate responsibility for actions. When a child is a brat at the age of four, some parent is not doing their job. Eventually, you need to grow up, hence teenage rebellion. This is when assessing the world around you, and deciding what to emulate starts. The ability to define socially acceptable behavior, evaluate morals is a process. You become capable of choosing to move beyond society and your personal history. Overcoming the nurture factor is part of becoming a fully actualized adult. So I vote yes, blame individuals for their judgment, and their use or abuse of the power of choice.
Wanted: The Not-Me Ghost; for crimes committed against the world. He is responsible for many things gone awry, any bad things that have ever happened, constantly getting children punished by parents, and for voting for George Bush. To be considered armed and dangerous, if seen please seek professional help or medication. You may have seen him that time when you were 3 years old and tried to cut our own hair and ended up looking like Britney Spears. Or maybe he was there that time when you were 8 and you got blamed for setting the cat’s tail on fire, when you were actually trying to save poor fluffy. And then there was that time when you were in middle school and got in trouble for touching the hot teacher’s butt, when it was the Not-Me Ghost who pushed your hand into it. And even that time when you were in high school and you got in trouble for smoking pot in the bathroom stall, because someone thought it’d be funny to pull the fire alarm and you ended up running through the school with your pants around your ankles. It was the Not-Me Ghost who pulled the alarm while you were dropping bombs, and you were scared and just forgot to pull up your pants… honest mistake really. So beware, the Not-Me Ghost is out there waiting, probably behind the wheel with a giant 40oz. of Colt 45.
It is easy to recognize the amount of ambiguity in the entire idea of morals. I purposely raised both sides of the issue to force people to simply think. There was no absolute answer because this issue can not be determined in an absolute manner. No absolute answer exists. Look at the issue from a different perspective: If you are a bartender, who served alcohol to a intoxicated person, and then watched him leave the restaurant- keys in hand- would you stop him? Would you accept some level of responsibility for his fate? Or, suggest to yourself that he has made his own choices and should take responsibility for his own actions? You were only doing your job! Similarly, if you are the intoxicated person, do you accept responsibility for your actions? Remember to evaluate your own actions and motivations as you would others.
It doesn’t take to much time to decipher. Responsibility is never easily extracted from the present generation of Americans.I think often the forthcoming response of “I didn’t do it” should be erased and muted from our vocabulary. Wouldn’t we all love to work with responsible and mature adult, not only the ones who take the praise, and leave the blame for someone else to carry, but are accountable enough to say “my bad” when necessary. Sure we could blame the environment we grew up in as the result of our irresponsibility. It’s easy enough to point the finger at your superior, manager, or parent, and the automatic ones to take the blame.
But really are we talking about responsibility at all?
Or does it all just boil down to selfishness.
The kids throwing the party don’t want to take the “responsibility”, as we’re calling, it to monitor those there. But really who wants to have to do that...
The girl who got drunk wasn’t thinking of any one but herself and just having a good time.
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