Commentary
“A society that forgets how to carry its own weight won’t stay free for long—and America is dangerously close to proving that true.”
I grew up in a country where self-reliance was still considered a virtue. Americans were proud of being independent, proud of figuring things out, proud of carrying their own weight. That spirit is what built farms, businesses, and families strong enough to endure hardship and still pass something down to the next generation.
But somewhere along the way, something shifted. The idea of personal responsibility began to erode, and with it, the culture that made America different.
Today we don’t just expect the government to defend our rights. We expect it to fix our healthcare, fix the economy, set our wages, regulate our food, police our homes, and solve every problem that life presents. We are living in a time when people are not only willing to hand over their responsibilities—they are begging for more government intervention in every corner of life.
I moved from California to Texas because I believed people here valued freedom more. And in many ways they do. But I’ve also watched both many clamor for the government to step in and manage things that used to be ours to manage. Left or right, it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. The deeper cultural disease is the same: we’ve forgotten how to carry our own responsibilities.
If you look back, you can trace how this mindset took root. The Great Depression was devastating, and FDR’s New Deal promised security at a time when people were desperate. But it also marked the beginning of Americans looking to Washington not just for defense, but for daily provision. Later, the Great Society expanded welfare and healthcare programs in the 1960s, embedding the idea that government wasn’t just a safety net in crisis—it was the permanent caretaker of citizens. By the time the 2008 financial crisis hit, we had normalized bailouts. Wall Street collapsed, but the government carried the weight of the failure. Those who made bad bets weren’t the ones who paid.
And then came 2020. During COVID, we didn’t just outsource responsibility—we abandoned it completely. Our health, the most personal responsibility of all, was handed over to bureaucrats and politicians. We let them decide whether we could work, gather, or breathe freely. Worse still, anyone who dared to remember they were sovereign—anyone who took responsibility for their own health, questioned mandates, or chose a different path—was villainized. We turned personal responsibility itself into a threat.
That shift was more than temporary. Even today, there’s an undercurrent in mainstream narratives that paints self-responsibility as selfish, reckless, or even dangerous. To make your own choices about health, family, or education is treated as if it puts others at risk. That mindset hasn’t gone away; it still threads its way through our politics, our media, and even casual conversations. And it may be the most corrosive lie of all: that freedom exercised responsibly is somehow a danger, while dependency is a virtue.
Health is maybe the clearest example of what we’ve lost. Who, if not ourselves, should be responsible for what we eat, what we put into our bodies, and what we surround ourselves with? And yet, our culture treats health as something that should be guaranteed by the system—as if no matter how we live, someone else will make us whole. That’s not reality. That’s not nature. And it’s certainly not freedom.
On the farm, responsibility is not optional. If you don’t water the crops, they die. If you neglect the soil, it won’t feed you. If you don’t care for the animals, they suffer. Farming has a way of cutting through illusions. You can’t outsource the work to someone else and expect to reap the reward. You have to show up. You have to take responsibility. And when you do, you learn that responsibility isn’t a punishment—it’s a privilege.
Which is why it’s so alarming to watch our culture surrender it piece by piece. A society that refuses responsibility will also refuse freedom, because the two are bound together. You cannot have one without the other.
And here’s the danger: when we trade responsibility for victimhood, when we expect someone else to solve our problems, it doesn’t just weaken us—it erodes us. It eats away at critical thinking and logic. It makes us fragile, dependent, and endlessly outraged when life doesn’t bend to our demands. Victimhood may feel comfortable in the short term, but it destroys the very qualities required to live free.
Maybe the question we should be asking—instead of fighting about which politician scored points at a hearing or who “won” a debate—is simpler: who is responsible for your life? If the answer isn’t “me,” then freedom is already gone.
I don’t want more regulations, more bureaucracy, or more interference in daily life. I want a government that does what it was designed to do: maintain a military for defense if needed, and protect the rights afforded to us by God, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. Nothing more. Everything else belongs to us.
Because the truth is this: we are on the cusp of losing any sense of freedom. The moment we surrender responsibility, we surrender freedom, and once freedom is gone, it rarely comes back.
So we have to ask ourselves: do Americans even want to live in a free country anymore? Are we willing to shoulder the responsibility that comes with freedom—or do we now see that as a tired, outdated idea, something to discard as we move willingly into the next era of dependency and control?
The answer to that question will determine not only the world we live in now, but the world for all those who come after us. And the saddest part may be this: not only have we forgotten how to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, I’m not even sure most people today know what bootstraps are.
That’s how far we’ve drifted. But if freedom is to survive, we don’t have the luxury of ignorance anymore. We have to remember. We have to take responsibility for ourselves, our families, and our communities. Because if we don’t, no government will save us—and no generation after us will forgive us.
