Unfortunately as a nation our culture appears to have shifted away from taking personal responsibility for anything. It's always someone else's fault now. Some

Unfortunately as a nation our culture appears to have shifted away from taking personal responsibility for anything. It's always someone else's fault now. Some else's responsibility. Someone else's job. I have seen many comments that this has become worse since the isolation period caused by COVID. I tend to agree but I also think it goes deeper than that. We have some problems in our society that have been festering for much longer and have root causes like inequality, lack of opportunity, and a lack of constructive facilities and positive role models. I hear a lot from friends who work in education about children coming to school with profoundly disturbing attitudes and other children who have experienced nasty forms of abuse. And yes - absolutely the schools and the government should push back against problems like bullying and misogyny and racism where they can. But maybe the answer here isn't just trying to lock up this week's negative social media influencer or introduce unusual and potentially dangerous concepts like regulating online content that is "harmful" yet not illegal or expecting governments to spy on us all and interfere in our lives more often. Maybe we should first be asking why so many kids think they have nothing better to do than spend all day watching that nasty online content in the first place. Maybe we should be asking why so many kids are given unsupervised and unregulated access to ideas they aren't ready to deal with yet. That's about education and children but you can pick almost any hot button topic and find similar examples. Try immigration or people who live entirely off state benefits. You can find plenty of examples where people advocate for papering over social problems but there's a sad lack of discussion about properly fixing the cracks underneath. Those are the real social harms we should be trying to reduce. Unfortunately their perpetrators are often among the first to assume it must be someone else's problem.