Taking responsibility for mistakes is foreign concept in many lawsuits

By David McElroy · December 31, 2011

Chelsea Hess was 20 years old when she walked into a South Carolina bar and ordered an alcoholic drink. The legal age for drinking in the state is 21, but the bar didn’t check her identification. On her way home, she drove her car off the road and is now a paraplegic. She’s suing the bar — because clearly the bar is responsible for her drinking and poor driving.

Hess’s lawsuit is emblematic of a trend for the last few decades of people looking for anyone else to blame for their troubles. We’re supposed to live in a risk-free and no-fault world, at least from the point of view of certain individuals. These people are so self-centered that they can’t be at fault. If something goes wrong in their world, someone else is to blame.

Contrary to what Hess believes, the folks at the bar aren’t her parents. The bar owner has a legal obligation to the state to obey its rules about alcohol sales, but that doesn’t — or at least shouldn’t — make it responsible for her actions. If the state insists on fining the bar for failing to check her ID, that’s an administrative matter between the bar and the regulators. But it doesn’t mean the bar is responsible for the series of actions that Hess took that led to her own problems.

When I was a child, my father was an executive in the safety department of Southern Railway (which is now Norfolk Southern after a merger). Every now and then, he would have to get out of the office and travel in the cab of an engine to observe safety procedures. Even though these occasions were rare, he still saw serious safety violations — but they were mostly by the public, not by the engineers.

On one occasion, he saw a woman in a car drive part of the way across the tracks and then decide she couldn’t make it, so she backed up. Then she apparently decided the train wasn’t going as fast as she thought, so she decided to try to beat it anyway, so she sped forward. The train hit the car. I don’t recall the details, but I believe she was hurt badly and a couple of small children in the car were killed.

The woman sued the railroad and won. It seemed to make no sense to me, even as a child. “Juries are sympathetic to people who get hurt,” my father explained. “They figure the railroad has plenty of money, so they make the railroad pay, even though it wasn’t at fault.”

That seems to be where we are in society. People aren’t willing to admit their errors and take responsibility for fixing them — and for dealing with the consequences.

In the South Carolina bar case, Hess might win or not. The insurance company for the bar might settle out of court to avoid an expensive lawsuit. That’s hard to say. What’s easy to say, though, is that Hess is another person looking for someone else to blame. Whether she gets any money or not from this insane suit, she’s going to go through her life playing the victim.

Even if she’s a paraplegic, she can learn something from this tragic mistake — if she’ll take responsibility for it and deal with the consequences of it. Playing a helpless victim all of her life will just compound the tragedy of what she’s already done to herself.

Addendum: If you’re one of those who uses alcohol or any other recreational drug, remember to be responsible in your actions tonight. New Year’s Eve is a time when a lot of people make very poor decisions about such substances. Please be careful and responsible.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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