David McElroy

When I was a child, I admired Richard Nixon and supported him during the dark days of Watergate. Why not? He was my president. He was the great man who had been selected to “run the country.” My civic indoctrination taught me this. I eventually grew up and learned better, but it seems that many people never outgrown this childish desire to put politicians onto pedestals.

USA Today released its annual poll last week of who Americans admire most. I shouldn’t be disgusted — because I know human nature — but I am disgusted. Topping the list of men is Barack Obama. Topping the list of women is Hillary Clinton.

I’m not making a partisan statement in saying this. My issue isn’t that they’re both Democrats. I’d have felt the same way when it was George W. Bush during his administration. My issue with it its that we deify politicians in this culture — instead of honoring the people who actually achieve things worth doing.

Take a look at the list and see all the politicians. I’ve colored all the political figures in red. (And, yes, I count Michelle Obama and Laura Bush as politicians. You’d have never heard of them if they weren’t associated with politics.) On the women’s side, 80 percent are politicians and the two remaining choices are entertainers. Why do we admire these people?

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Is this the face of a criminal? Apparently so, because the Pinellas County, Fla., Sheriff’s Office has charged 16-year-old Allie Scott with stalking after she made an innocuous Facebook post.

Allie’s slide into “stalker territory” started with a simple mistake. She parked her brother’s car in the school parking lot in another girl’s parking spot. She was told to move the car, so that’s what she did at the end of the day. When she went to the car, though, she found that someone had scratched the body with a key.

She didn’t name any person who she thought did it, but she posted this on Facebook: “Oh, so you keyed my car. Your karma is going to be a whole lot worse than that.”

The school’s crack administration sprang into action, summoning this evil young woman to the office. Her mother was called to the school, too, in order to deal with the heinous crime. Then they were sent to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, where she was charged with the crime of stalking. Allie faces a court hearing next week. She was handed a three-day suspension at school.

This isn’t the face of a stalker, but it is the face of a victim of “zero tolerance” policies run amuck. Some school administrators today are so afraid of exercising any judgement that they’ve developed draconian policies that are applied with one-size-fits-all idiocy, whether the circumstances fit the “crime” or not.

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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.

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