Responsibility

Responsibility... It's a word that most people don't know the meaning of anymore. When I was in the fifth grade, our teacher gave us a riling speech about how we were going to have to be more responsible for our assignments because in middle school the teachers would not keep asking us for them. We would get zeros! Ha! What a joke. Sixth grade was by far the easiest grade of all. Those teachers practically spoon fed us everything. There was no need for responsibility. When I was in the eigth grade, I got the same damn speech I had in fifth grade. Guess what - didn't happen in high school either. High school was a breeze ~ still no responsbility required in the educational department. How do we expect our children to learn a sense of responsibility when we never teach our children that? And better yet - how do we instill responsibility in society when our leaders have no sense of responsibility? Case in point - the nevirapine fiasco in Africa. NIH knew this study was riddled with violations of patient safety. Their document keeping made Richard Nixon look good. So what do they do? Why, they contend that "the study suffered from flawed document keeping and violated some federal regulations, but they believe its scientific conclusions about nevirapine's usefulness and safety remain valid." OK - so they can't keep records and they violated a couple federal laws - they're study was positive right? WRONG! What kind of ethical responsibility is that?? Compound with this the fact that NIH is preying upon people in a continent riddled with poverty and AIDS. These people are just happy to get AIDS medicine - since good ole' George W. Bush stopped the funding of Planned Parenthood Clinics in Africa because they might mention the option of abortion, AIDS medicines are quite hard to come by. *GASP* Not abortion! It's much better to bring an HIV positive baby into a nation of poverty with a life expectancy of 21! (Note large amounts of sarcasm). But the Mexico City Policy is a whole other story... No wonder our youth and our society has no sense of responsibility - parents have no sense of responsibility, the education system has no sense of responsibility, and our leaders have no sense of responsibility.