On Coming to Accountability – Sunday, June 05, 1955
Today we should like to suggest a bit of after-commencement counsel: For students leaving school—for millions of them—summer is a season, generally speaking, of less supervision.
Some find work or organized activity of one kind or another. Some are settling down to their life’s careers, and some are simply let loose. But for all, we suggest an added awareness of the real, the inescapable responsibility, we have for ourselves, for our own decisions.
In our early years we become accustomed to having parents make many decisions for us, and to having teachers tell us what to do from day to day. Before we come to years of accountability such assuming of responsibility by others would seem to be essential to the process of growing and learning.
But sooner or later in life we find ourselves in situations when neither parents nor teachers are nearby to tell us what to do and what not to do. Sooner or later, and preferably sooner, we must know for ourselves, right from wrong, and must decide for ourselves which is which.
There comes a time when all of us must know the law and live it, must meet problems and solve them, must face decisions and make them, must look squarely at life and meet it face to face. And there comes a time when our youthful years are no longer a fully acceptable excuse for all our errors.
Every wise parent knows, and every teacher, too, that every child must sooner or later learn to face facts and accept the consequences of his own actions. And parents, and teachers also, have a solemn and a sacred obligation to teach children sound principles by which they can make up their own minds and decide squarely and honestly some things for themselves.
But beyond the teaching of principles, beyond the setting of a good example, beyond patient pleading and persuading and hoping and praying, there are some things that even a parent cannot do, not even for his own child. There are some things that no, one can do for anyone.
No one can always make all our decisions. No one can always take full responsibility for us. Others may counsel and love and work for us, persuade and pray for us, but they cannot forever spare us our own responsibility for our own lives.
And they would not be wise to do so if they could. Having been taught correct principles, having been taught what to do and what not to do, we must then assume the consequences of our own doing, of our own choosing, of our own living. *
*Revised.
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June 05, 1955
Broadcast Number 1,346