Rockridge High School

Taylor Ridge, Illinois

Teacher: Barbara Downey

 

 

Personal Responsibility

By Blake Anderson

Grade 12

As communities grow older and become more developed, people feel exempt from improving the quality of life in their community.  As a result, community life struggles to become better, but there are those who wish to improve and those who wish to try.  For those few people who are brave enough to stand up to the harshness of reality, they will be commended, and their town will prevail.

As a community, we wonder what we can do to make solving problems better.  People know what is wrong but do not know what to do.  Underage drinking is one problem that ties into every community.  We all know that teens drink to be “cool” or to be “in”, but what is stopping them?  Police officers usually can not see the problem until it is too late, resulting in devastating effects.  Teens perish, and their faces are remembered as just a drunk who killed someone.

 

To protect our teens and future teens, police and parents need to be more aware of what their child is doing.  Also, school policies are getting more lax.   Every day I see underage students smoking outside the school hidden from view.  Sometimes I see students using chewing tobacco to, once again, be “cool” upon the school premises.  The only reason we do not see these acts is because we do not look for them as much.  School employees may see these acts and not care, but that is the problem, not caring.  In some teens lives, drugs are as important as eating and sleeping. Officials know they are capable to commit these offenses, but seem to overlook these teens.  We need to catch teens in the act, to look for them so we can cut the drug problem at the root.

As I stated before, the community needs to keep drunk teens off the road. You may ask, “Well, why not grown-ups?”  Adults have made their choices in life and what they want to do with it, they will do it.  Teens, on the other hand, can learn early about the mistakes, to save them the pain and agony later on in their adult life.  Speed limits, though, can be enforced on everyone.  I have seen people go 150 mph on highways and 80 mph through some towns.  This, specifically, can cause more accidents than in most drunk driving cases.  I guess I do not comprehend why going this fast means so much to some speeders.  Yeah, you might get somewhere faster, but I will get there safer.  I do not think that cops enforce speed limits too much.  If we made cars so they only went 80 mph, no one could speed excessively.

There are those of us who do need mentoring, however, to stop these problems.  No, I am not talking about AA meetings, just somebody to look up to or someone who you want to be like, a role model.  It may be your parents or a famous figure head of society, but whomever it is, I guarantee you will want to become that person.  Maybe you do not want to be exactly like your mentor, but instill some of their best qualities into yourself.  When we hear the word “counseling”, we think of a shrink or a doctor, but in some ways it may help to be counseled.

The only person that makes this decision can be you.  You have to ask yourself, “Do I want to become better?” or “Am I really in need of help?” If you let it pass, you may endanger yourself and your fellow peers.  Maybe you just need someone to associate yourself with in your community.  It could be a close family friend, or it could just be one of your friends.  Your friends know you and what you are like and may have noticed your problem, but let it pass.  If you ask, they may be more willing to help you.

For those people who stand up and face problems in their community, they can only better the standards of living and growing in their community.  For those who fail to see the problems, they will only suffer more for not knowing.  We, as a community, need to become strong and face our problems head-on.  We will become closely tied as a family instead of a community, one person looking out for the next.

 

Personal Responsibility Essay Questions
 
    1. In the U.S. we invest in time and effort for our happiness.  We also get to choose our own partners.  In Manus,  people invest in objects and base that on their marriages.

    2.  Most of the people that I interviewed said that the most  important thing in a relationship is how you value commitment.  Others said that trust and talking over problems is equally important.

    3.  People need to straighten up their lives to make their own lives happier.

    4. The idea behind this is that we need to clean up local roadways and work together for safer streets.

    5.  People need everything or else  they will drop out of society completely.  Future generations will be based around more material objects.

    6.  The passage states that people create a forum of public responsibility and accountability that would not happen in an uncontrollable democracy.

    7.  I prefer regulations because regulations are just easy directions that we follow.  An alternate way may to do these things in different ways.

    8.  If baby boomers retire, more jobs would be open to upcoming generations that have new ideas and concepts.

    9.  Poverty will always remain in the U.S. and 

1)      Somebody will always be poor

2)      2) The unemployment rate is too high

3)      3) Poverty still remains the same as it was awhile back.
 
    10.  The three objectives that are the most important are : religion, reaching your collective goal, and to always be determined.