“Everything you do is based on the choices you make. It’s not your parents, your past relationships, your job, the economy, the weather, an argument or your age that is to blame. You and only you are responsible for every decision and choice you make. Period.”
This message popped up last week on my Facebook page, posted by a friend from the Lower Mainland. It’s one of those pithy phrases that fits nicely on T-shirts and, if one doesn’t give too much thought, passes for cleverness, if not wisdom.
On the surface, the sentiment sounds reasonable enough. But my thoughts went immediately to how easy it is to swallow this nonsense, or to pass it on as a well-meaning truism.
It might be true, in the most literal sense, that everything we do is indeed based on the choices we make. But the more important issue is left unspoken — do we all have the same abilities with which to make those choices? Of course not, no more than we are all “created equal” as Thomas Jefferson opined in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”). In the context of the latter, I suspect that what the writer intended to convey was that everyone should be treated equally, because it is most certainly not true that all are created equal, any more than all are capable of making good choices.
We are born with different abilities — intellectual and physical among them. Those factors alone would seem to make it obvious that we are not born equal and that our abilities to make choices can be compromised. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to conclude that people with low intellects might be at a disadvantage in learning the various skills that contribute to good decision-making.
And it isn’t just what we are born with. It might be where we are born, and when. Who has a better opportunity to make something of their lives — and to make choices at all — a post-war baby boomer born in Canada or an AIDS-era African?
And what about environment? Writer Malcolm Gladwell has put forth the well-reasoned argument that a child born to bad parents who live in a good neighbourhood has a better chance of success than one with good parents who live in a bad neighbourhood.
When I posted an objection on Facebook to the friend who shared the quote that opens this column, another person jumped in with “HA tell that to the five guys that raped the girl in India while blaming the girl.” She has a point, of course, and I certainly wouldn’t argue that people who make bad choices shouldn’t have to face the consequences. But still, environment is definitely at play here, because that brutal rape and other similar crimes took place in a country where abortions are routinely performed to rid the mother of a female fetus because males are the preferred gender in much of the society. The horrific act that led to the death of an innocent girl was surely fueled by an environment in which the female is devalued to the point where abortion based on the gender of a fetus is acceptable.
For 10 years I shared my life with men who had intellectual deficits. Some had mental illnesses and physical handicaps, too. Were they capable of making choices? For the most part, no. They were most certainly not created equal, either. Each lived to old age, having been in the care of the state for their entire life. None ever held a productive job, and they weren’t able to read or to prepare their own meals. If not for the fact that we live in a society that didn’t simply discard them, they might not have lived past childhood. They didn’t make contributions in any of the ways we usually think of as positive or meaningful, but they made my life far richer than it would have been had I not shared it with them.
The quote that so offended me doesn’t leave room for the many, many factors that influence choices and I think it’s a shame that it and so many others are shared without much thought.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.