We Need to Accept Responsibility

Our Buddhist teaching upholds the principle that our first responsibility should be towards the community, only then comes to our family and yourself. A community starts degrading when this order is reversed. Social responsibility ought to be the moral obligation of every citizen. A sign of a good citizen is that he is willing to pull his own weight and see the overall welfare in the society through minimal ecological footprint and social burden.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

--Winston Churchill

The individual responsibility can be judged from the way individual consume, produce and behave in the society, it is associated with your daily habits. A rich man can efforts all luxurious things, but if he acquired more than the required, he inherently lack social responsibility. He is compromising the welfare of many other underprivileged people through unnecessary stockpiling of things that originally originate from nature and the environment. The problem today is this, a consumerist society! Today we are extracting more than the required from nature to produce and then consume without knowledge of exhaustion. We are also not aware of where does all the waste generated during the production and the used products go.

Our societies are not destroyed by the activities of bad people but by the inactivity of good, rich and literate people. What a paradox! If those literate and wealthy people can tolerate destruction by being inactive, how can they be good? The question is, are they discharging their social responsibility? Are they not too ambitious in conquering only personal gains and profits without knowing that there is worst aftermath of our activities?

We cannot live as if we have another earth we can move to. There is definitely no Planet B. On a daily basis, we need to do something that makes this world a better place to live. We are custodians for future generations. If we do not behave responsibly, how can future generations forgive us?

If the average life expectancy of a Bhutanese people is 70 years and if you are 35 years old, you have 365 days x 35 years, to live. Ask yourself this question: What are you going to do with this time? When we accept or add responsibility, we make ourselves more valuable. Don't we? Yes, can’t we seriously think of making our society a better place to live?

When we openly urinate and defecate ourselves, don’t try to complain about the smell of the sewerage outflowing on the roads though cracked drains and tanks. Don’t try to shout at the place that it looks untidy when we litter our own garbage openly in the undesignated area. It totally looks insane to see commuters covering their nose when they walked near landfill site or dumpsite because the reason for the odour smell is that they mixed both the degradable and non-degradable waste from their very little unsophisticated home and reached there. Thus, every unpleasant thing we perceived in the society initially boils down to our individual lack of responsibility and self-discipline.

We need to accept responsibility for our behaviour and our actions and insulate ourselves from excuses. Don't be like the student who failed just because he didn't like the teacher or the subject. Who is he hurting the most? We have to accept responsibility and stop blaming others, then, and only then, will productivity and quality of life improve. A community will proper. Remember, we all owe a responsibility to the environment, society, work, family and to self. Let’s all accept the responsibilities.

Accepting responsibilities involves taking calculated, not foolish. It means evaluating all the pros and cons, then taking the most appropriate decision or action. It means gauging the everyday simple things you do. It also means to think that this is a shared world and that we all truly owe to it. Responsible people don't think that the world owes them a living instead they think we have the responsibility to care and make it a happier place to co-exist harmoniously.