QotD: The Victim Culture

I never read Cinderella or the Little Match Girl to my daughter or my sons. I instinctively steered away from fairy tales where the main character through no fault of their own gets dealt a raw deal by life but not to fret because at the 11th hour someone will intervene and they all will live happily ever after. Life is just not like that. As it is written, the rain falls on the just and the unjust and that about sums it up. No one gets a free pass for a trouble free life.

More importantly, I didn't want my children to live out their lives as a victim; wallowing in defeat and distress while waiting patiently for a knight in shining armor to show up to save them from misfortune or folly. I wanted them to grow up to be the heroes of their own lives.

All of which means that I am seriously out of sync with the times I live in. Today, every one is a victim in constant need of being saved from misfortune, discrimination or the outright folly of our own devising. This is not the Age of Chivalry and there are no knights in shining armor riding to the rescue but the call goes out regularly for the government to fund some program or designate some group "victims" in order to spare them the logical consequences of their own choices.

Kateland, "Fairy Tales in Crack Houses", The Last Amazon, 2005-10-18