ON RESPONSIBILITY

Still the wheel of blame blindly spins, and blind justice again pins blame everywhere but where
she should. Another child loses her (invulnerable) life and society again avoids the right choice.
Let's run this down, shall we? A 17 year old ambassador's daughter, by her own admission in love with getting and being high, climbs a 34th story balcony to snap a photo of herself and plummets to a 6 AM demise. Blame gets spun, for some there's none.
While some fault lies with the bar that served her, its unrealistic to totally blame them. As the owner of a Columbia area deli states, you see IDs from every state in the union and overseas and verification is hard if not impossible. College age women nowadays empathetically do not look like those I went to school with and in order to imbibe will claim a different birth date. I stopped a local bar from serving my then 17 year old niece, who had both the looks and ID to pass for 21. To blame the apartment owner is equally wrong, for as with the bar, how is he to know his guests' age?
Missing in the blame game are the by now grieving parents. While Daddy was off playing ambassador and Mommy was off doing whatever, their daughter was indulging in a hedonistic lifestyle that led to her untimely demise.
In death she also had a full house. Being attractive, rich and white meant the media turned its full attention on her. Had she been of merely average looks, black or Hispanic there would have been considerably less media attention.
On an equal level I blame the media. We are bombarded with the news that the smirking cebultard Paris Hilton has gotten off on yet another possession charge or that the celebrity train wreck Lindsay Lohan is crying that well-deserved jail time will cut into her film career. Those reading these gossip column tidbits disguised as news feel that they also deserve the breaks the glitteri are getting.
Consider this a wake up call for society to shift blame from the schools, government and police to where it justly belongs. Its way past time for society to put the blame on non-caring and non-present parents.