Resolve to be more responsible

You may cross me off your Christmas list for saying this, but most of us have not been a whole lot more responsible about the future of our country’s economic health than the idiots on Wall Street.

This thought occurred to me as I was driving down the turnpike, yammering on my cell phone to someone about the Wall Street wizards. I was complaining about idiots putting our money at risk while doing the same thing myself, because yammering on the phone while driving puts me at risk of serious injury that you would have to help pay for.

Around this country millions of us are doing just as I was, indulging ourselves in the moment in ways that have costly repercussions for all of us in the longer haul. Are you driving a gas-guzzling Hummer or driving to the corner store when you could walk? You are part of why the cost of oil is strangling our economy, our globe is warming, and oil-producing countries have us by the national gonads.

Haven’t been exercising regularly? You are part of why our country has the most expensive health care in the world and is having trouble competing in a global economy. Buying things on credit that you really cannot afford? You are part of why we are a nation of debtors in hawk to the rest of the world.

It is not just you and me; companies, communities and governments are also doing their share of acting irresponsibly. Is your restaurant selling single meals that contain more calories than most diners need in an entire day without listing the calorie content of the meal right on the menu? You are part of why America is the most overweight country in the world. Are you in Congress pandering to voters’ baser instincts with easy promises instead of leading us with difficult truths? You are part of why so many of our problems seem intractable.

The list of those acting a little irresponsibly about our futures is long and most of us are on it. See, personal responsibility is a slippery thing. We think we can just let little pieces of it go in trade for something we want in the moment, and because it was an individual act on a small scale the repercussions are also small. But sooner or later, millions of individual acts of seemingly minor irresponsibility can all add up to a collective catastrophe. One couple buys a home they really cannot afford, whether hoodwinked by an unscrupulous mortgage lender or by their own hope for homeownership. Two parents think it is no big deal if their children eat, sit, and weigh a little too much.

Multiply all of those minor acts of individual irresponsibility by tens of millions and you have, respectively, the basis for our current financial crisis and the first generation of American children likely to live fewer years than their parents. Multiply my cell phone use while driving by a hundred million yammering drivers and you have billions of dollars in preventable car crash injury costs we have collectively added to our nation’s unaffordable medical bills.

The ugly truth is that most of us – me included – have happily participated in our national party of plenty while putting off our responsibility and comeuppance to another day, and our national debts to another generation.

We have been wasting our future, and that of our children, in a lifestyle we know we cannot afford but refuse to do our individual parts to change. We have, in other words, individually and collectively, bailed out on many of our responsibilities while complaining about bailing out Wall Street.

Well, the party is over, for those on Wall Street and for us on Main Street. On our way to casting the first stones at those who got us in our current mess we should all take a look in the mirror at our own behavior. If we did, we might put down our stones, go home, pick one or two things we could each do to be more responsible (my early New Year’s resolution – no more driving while yammering), and emerge in a few years from this Nightmare on Wall Street as a nation of more responsible people.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.