06 August 2006
♥ parenting, return, and foreign policies are all the same
Here is an incredibly nerdy story: From the time I was three, my mother would always say "personal responsibility" to me. I hated that. When I would whine or cry about something, she would just look at me and say, "What am I going to say, Emma?" and I would sigh and say, in my little toddler voice, "Personal responsibility." I learned that the kitty would bite me if I tried to hold him when he didn't want to be held, that I couldn't just help myself to things that were out of my reach, that if I wanted to know where certain toys were I would have to put them away when I was done playing with them.
The nerdy part is this: at sixteen years old, I am realizing that my mother was, and is, right. (May she not read this until I am much, much older, because I'm sure she would never let me live it down if she saw it now. Then again, I am posting it for the world to see. Personal responsibility.) As much as I hate it, there is a note on my kitchen table right now with my orthodontist's number and a note from my mother that reads: "Em: 2 words - personal responsibility." I'm not going to call, because I don't have braces and I'm so over the orthodontist, but the point remains the same: you have to live with the choices you make.
This little anecdote, as unamused as it may have left you, is the introduction to a musing on policy.
[Warning: it gets nerdier from here. I am going to talk about work.]
I hate to be so positive about my employer (it's not a very fight-the-man thing to do), but Petsmart is a pretty decent corporation. They don't sell cats or dogs. Each store has an adoption center where homeless pets from local shelters are rotated in and out (because more people visit Petsmart than do the shelters) because they believe that it is more important to find homes for animals that already exist than simply to make a profit by cranking out more puppies. They have 14-day guarantees on their fish - and they'll test your water for free if your fish die - because they believe in the products, live and otherwise, that they sell. In addition, we've got a pretty loose return policy: you can return anything, even live animals, at any time, with or without a receipt or tags, whether or not it's been used.
What people don't seem to understand is that it's not an upgrade program. I guess the return policy sets us up for it, but it's not like when you buy your eight-year-old a pair of skis and you pay the store for the privilege of exchanging for new sizes as your kid grows. People here buy their dog a collar, and ten months later, when we can't resell it because it's covered in your dog's hair and we don't even carry that brand anymore, they return it for a new one because it's gotten too old to use. I'm totally not even kidding.
This is where personal responsibility comes in. Sure, if it's defective after two weeks, fine, return it for one that keeps tags on your dog. But otherwise, you bought your dog that collar, you took the tags off, you used it. It is yours. It is not the company's responsibility to cut its loss and write the collar off, because it is not defective. It is used.
This mindset, in essence, is the same one we're seeing from the Bush administration. The government sent money to what they knew were fundamentalist groups in the eighties, ignored intelligence that there were going to be some sort of terrorist activities in fall 2001, then pleaded clueless when three thousand people were killed on September 11. They break the rules of the Geneva Convention by harboring prisoners without trials at Gitmo, then claim to be shocked and bomb the living hell out of innocent villages in Afghanistan when an American has been kidnapped in response. They send troops to the Middle East and start an Iraqi civil war, then cry for peace in the Middle East. (Somehow, though, they still manage to "justify" their refusal to call for an Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefire. Go figure.) They want democracy in the countries they invade, then try to oust [democratically elected] leaders when they are not pro-America.
You'll get no argument from me that war and death are not the answers. I strongly believe that terrorist and fundamentalist groups are in the wrong, but I also believe that the United States government needs to start following some of its own advice. It needs to stop acting like a fundamentalist group and listen to its people when they march in the streets and demand that no troops are sent overseas.
It all comes down to the same thing my mother told me when I was three: personal responsibility. The definition of insanity, according to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We need to stop making the same choices over and over again and find something that really does work. We need to take responsibility for our actions and how they got us into the situations we're in now, whether it's Iraq, Petsmart, or your three-year-old.
The nerdy part is this: at sixteen years old, I am realizing that my mother was, and is, right. (May she not read this until I am much, much older, because I'm sure she would never let me live it down if she saw it now. Then again, I am posting it for the world to see. Personal responsibility.) As much as I hate it, there is a note on my kitchen table right now with my orthodontist's number and a note from my mother that reads: "Em: 2 words - personal responsibility." I'm not going to call, because I don't have braces and I'm so over the orthodontist, but the point remains the same: you have to live with the choices you make.
This little anecdote, as unamused as it may have left you, is the introduction to a musing on policy.
[Warning: it gets nerdier from here. I am going to talk about work.]
I hate to be so positive about my employer (it's not a very fight-the-man thing to do), but Petsmart is a pretty decent corporation. They don't sell cats or dogs. Each store has an adoption center where homeless pets from local shelters are rotated in and out (because more people visit Petsmart than do the shelters) because they believe that it is more important to find homes for animals that already exist than simply to make a profit by cranking out more puppies. They have 14-day guarantees on their fish - and they'll test your water for free if your fish die - because they believe in the products, live and otherwise, that they sell. In addition, we've got a pretty loose return policy: you can return anything, even live animals, at any time, with or without a receipt or tags, whether or not it's been used.
What people don't seem to understand is that it's not an upgrade program. I guess the return policy sets us up for it, but it's not like when you buy your eight-year-old a pair of skis and you pay the store for the privilege of exchanging for new sizes as your kid grows. People here buy their dog a collar, and ten months later, when we can't resell it because it's covered in your dog's hair and we don't even carry that brand anymore, they return it for a new one because it's gotten too old to use. I'm totally not even kidding.
This is where personal responsibility comes in. Sure, if it's defective after two weeks, fine, return it for one that keeps tags on your dog. But otherwise, you bought your dog that collar, you took the tags off, you used it. It is yours. It is not the company's responsibility to cut its loss and write the collar off, because it is not defective. It is used.
This mindset, in essence, is the same one we're seeing from the Bush administration. The government sent money to what they knew were fundamentalist groups in the eighties, ignored intelligence that there were going to be some sort of terrorist activities in fall 2001, then pleaded clueless when three thousand people were killed on September 11. They break the rules of the Geneva Convention by harboring prisoners without trials at Gitmo, then claim to be shocked and bomb the living hell out of innocent villages in Afghanistan when an American has been kidnapped in response. They send troops to the Middle East and start an Iraqi civil war, then cry for peace in the Middle East. (Somehow, though, they still manage to "justify" their refusal to call for an Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefire. Go figure.) They want democracy in the countries they invade, then try to oust [democratically elected] leaders when they are not pro-America.
You'll get no argument from me that war and death are not the answers. I strongly believe that terrorist and fundamentalist groups are in the wrong, but I also believe that the United States government needs to start following some of its own advice. It needs to stop acting like a fundamentalist group and listen to its people when they march in the streets and demand that no troops are sent overseas.
It all comes down to the same thing my mother told me when I was three: personal responsibility. The definition of insanity, according to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We need to stop making the same choices over and over again and find something that really does work. We need to take responsibility for our actions and how they got us into the situations we're in now, whether it's Iraq, Petsmart, or your three-year-old.
8/06/2006
