I grant that this can be the case. It may even be the average reality, but it is not universally so. I grew up in the ghetto and I know the life well. Since I was 8 I wanted nothing other than to get the hell out. No way was I going to be like that. My parents had some small part in this, with the emphasis on "small". Very small. Most of it was my nature, so far as I can tell.
I'd consider that a rare case. At age 8, a person may or may not have ever seen another kind of life that wasn't on the TV. And who knows what they're parents tell them about the truth of what is on TV?
Every person has a chance to make the right choice
once they have the opportunity to learn that it is possible. Many of the obstacles to learning enough about the world, about one's self, about what good choices are - are not a result of a 'victim mentality' but a result of factors outside the individual's control. Certainly there is a point where one can be expected to have enough of a rounded experience to make the right choices - and failure to do so beyond that point is inexcusable - but that point could conceivably be well after the first decade long prison sentence.
Would you agree that the person in question is no friend?
Definitely. But sometimes kids don't learn what a real friend is until far too late.
No argument there. But what does that say about the parenting in question? To say "they don't know any different" seems to me endlessly condescending. It implies that they are incapable of doping out for themselves the most basic common sense notions and I do not accept that for a moment. That lets such people off the hook far too easily - it's the old victim mentality gussied up in slightly different words and coming at you from another direction. I call that primo-fail.
This just reads to me as more assuming everyone should think like an adult who has had a reasonable opportunity to gain experience to make good choices - when there are some very old people who never have.
Agreed, but the impressionable child is not always quite as vulnerable as you suggest.
Possibly, but I maintain that children and adults who have had obstacles to experience placed in front of them all of their lives are often more vulnerable than it seems you are suggesting.
That aside, he presumably becomes an adult one day and the choice is always available to him to remain the same or change. That is available to virtually everyone.
Yeah, as society gets better, this becomes more true. I think people just want it to be virtually everyone - at a young age, before life is ruined. Some people advocate policy changes to that end.
If I can do it, anyone can.
I don't think so, experiences vary too widely for that to be true. And even if it is true, for some, it may only be at a very late age that enough experience has occurred that they can reasonably be considered fully responsible. Even then, have you tried to start your own business lately?
I taught in NYC ghetto schools for 3 years and I can tell you that the kids in the 'hood are anything but stupid. Therefore, there is nothing going on out there that by necessity defeats their ability to make better lives for themselves.
Intelligence is overrated, especially by the intelligent.
I would add that some of my worst students had parents who did everything they knew how to get their issue to tread the righteous path. In some cases the child simply refuses, despite having a solid family life. The same can be observed in middle-class suburbia. I watched this brand of drama playing out with the families of my daughter's friends in high school and, just as in the ghettoes, some kids with seemingly solid family lives chose poorly despite their full knowledge that they were heading for a high-speed collision with a brick wall. Awareness may be a necessary condition, but it is certainly not always sufficient.
Though true, it does nothing to prove that everyone has equal opportunity. In fact it highlights that opportunity varies widely. It's detrimental to view people who don't succeed as part of a hazy group of the 'victim mentality' problem, particularly when, as you say:
People choose and it is not always so neatly discernible why they go this way or that.
The babes in the woods argument holds little water with me because I have seen far too many people who, by that theory should have been burned to fly ash, put their lives right and became what I would assess to be successful.
And it is not always so neatly discernible why some succeed and some don't. Maybe success ought to be a fair measure of a person - but it surely won't be when there are so many ways in which, for instance, entire races of human beings are systemically mislabeled, falsely judged, and viewed individually as the worst among the whole.
osan said:
nayjevin said:
Much of that is not the fault of the impressionable child who grows up in a bad situation. I'm all for personal responsibility but it can't be expected from a person who hasn't ever seen opportunity.
Why can't it? You make a VERY big statement here - an important one, in fact, and yet you do not explain it, nor support it with facts. I would ask you explain why it is so.
Personal responsibility is learned. It's not inborn. Why do I need to explain that? Before a child has had a chance to learn something, you can't blame them for not knowing it. Are you among those reading internet forums about politics who don't understand that already? If so I can clarify that point some more if it's worth your time.
