I think Derb is right to raise the self-reliance theme and the Europeanization or nannyization (?) of American behavior. It’s been going on for a long time, and it’s linked to various Big Things in the culture, including the increasing domination of All Things American by the lawyers.
If a medical doctor is walking down the street and someone collapses in front of him, he’ll run away, because he knows if he tries to save the collapsee, and the guy dies, the doctor will be sued. So simple common sense gets driven out of daily behavior, because it’s legally dangerous to the would-be samaritain. This gets built into many areas of life, for example on university campuses. An undergraduate I know well walked out of his dorm room a while back and found a kid bleeding heavily in the hallway. He had a deep gash in his wrist. The undergraduate said the kid needed medical attention. The kid said no, he’d just had an accident, he’d been in a fight and had broken a window, but no need for doctors. The undergraduate called the medical people, the kid was taken to the hospital and treated. Nobody, not the ambulance people, not the doctor in the hospital, nobody looked into how it had happened. When the kid got back to the dorm, the undergraduate confronted him, said he didn’t believe the kid’s story (there was no evidence of a fight, there were no other bruises or wounds…) and the kid said, yeah, I made it up. So the undergraduate went to the university authorities and said look here, this kid tried to kill himself, he needs help. And the authorities patiently explained that they had no authority, indeed it would be illegal for them to insist on therapy, or even to call the kid’s parents. Privacy, and all that.
So even if all the good people at that university agreed that Something Should Be Done, they have been castrated by the lawyers. If they do the Right Thing they are guilty. It’s not just the problem Derb correctly identifies, it’s The Law.
I first ran into the Third Rail at lunch with an eccentric New York editor many years ago, in the early sixties. He said “America’s doomed, because we’ve decided everyone is entitled to one hang-up. Whatever it may be. All forms of deviant behavior are now tolerated, because, well, everyone gets one deviation. So you can’t criticize, you can’t say something is just wrong.” I think he overdid it, because I don’t think that ALL deviations are tolerated. I think there’s a list of OK Deviations, and the list changes according to current fads and moods. But we have developed an alarming ability to overlook things that should be addressed seriously. Bob Bork and Bee Himmelfarb have written great things on this tendency.
Derb is right that altogether too many of us are too passive, when we should be active, even hyperactive.
So there. I’m not going to get into the question, important though it may be, as to whether Derb should be shot. I leave that to others. But I do think we are overlawyered, and maybe there, as Shakespeare once remarked, there is a solution…