Burn Baby Burn

As I read about the LA suburbs burning and Mr. Obama talking about the need to save Detroit, I was struck by a similarity between the two. Both groups put themselves in a situation where a reasonable person would have foreseen trouble, and are now astonished to find that they are, in fact, in trouble.

A reasonable person could have predicted that if you sold low-quality cars made by overpaid employees, paid out all of the profits as "compensation" of one form or another, mounded up debt, and refused to save or innovate, you will eventually go out of business.

A reasonable person could have predicted that if you build flammable homes in the middle of a forest with a hundred year history of wildfires, a tendency towards period of drought, and then watched as year after year there were fires, and saw that while the fires themselves were contained, the fuel for them continued to mound up, chances were very high your house would eventually burn.

The common link is the American cult of the victim. We have, as a culture, become a nation of whiners who always want to blame someone else for their problems, and worse, want someone else to fix them. Until we start to take responsibility for our problems, and separately and more importantly, fixing them, this nation will continue its descent.