Too much pressure. Didn’t have a choice. There’s always an excuse for doing wrong. It’s time we take responsibility and stop blaming . . . : The Other Guy

First came the graceful, powerful swing that flowed so naturally, like a shark through still water. It was as sweet as his name, and it brought attention to Darryl Strawberry. Then came the expectations.

The money.

The booze.

The .25 caliber semiautomatic.

The drugs.

The IRS.

More chances.

More drugs.

Pain and pressure, that’s why he drank, Strawberry wrote in his 1992 autobiography. It’s his explanation for a lot of things, but does it excuse his actions?

By allowing him to wear pin-stripes, New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner has sent the message that there are no consequences--that people can act irresponsibly and do drugs, cheat the government, assault others with guns and there will always be another chance.

Excuses are plentiful for the rich and famous. Gov. Pete Wilson employed an illegal immigrant, but it was OK because he didn’t know she was illegal. President Clinton didn’t inhale, so that made smoking pot acceptable. The Menendez brothers said they were abused, so that excused them for killing their parents.

If they can do it, why can’t we? We all make excuses, lay blame on the pain and pressure of our lives. We drink too much because we need to unwind. We cheat on our taxes because we tell ourselves that it is the norm. We inhale.

We have become drug dealers and Robin Hoods, corporate thieves who turn our backs on child support but give to the church and buy uniforms for Little League teams. We have lost perspective.

How do we get it back? Can personal responsibility be legislated? What balance must be struck between personal and corporate responsibility?

Where do we begin?

*

“He hit me first.”

“I didn’t do it.”

We learn to blame others as soon as we learn there are benefits to avoiding consequences. Getting away with something has become a measure of success. Failure means getting caught.

Surveys conducted by the Josephson Institute for Ethics in Marina del Rey show that each year, about one-third of all high school students steal from a store. More than 60% cheat in school during that same period.

In 1992, Michael Josephson, president of the institute, visited a high school whose students were included in the survey. He spoke to them about cheating.

“I said to a teacher on the way out, ‘How can you allow this much cheating?’ Keep in mind this is a good guy because he invited me in and he cares about ethics. He said, ‘The problem is if we stopped our kids from cheating, they would be at a competitive disadvantage.’ ”

And that would be irresponsible.

The results of the survey say more about adults--teachers and parents--than students, Josephson says.

“Obviously we could look to the young people and say, ‘Look at this, they’re cheating, they’re stealing, they’re lying, they’re not taking personal responsibility for their conduct.’ I don’t think that that is the accurate conclusion. I think that it’s more that the teachers and parents have not taken responsibility for parenting and teaching. Young people are no fundamentally different than they’ve ever been. I mean, there’s no genetic deficiency here. We’re not dealing with moral mutants.”

What we are dealing with, however, are young people facing more “pressures” than in the past. It used to be, Josephson says, they were called “temptations.”

“When we called it temptation, we knew what our responsibility was,” he says. “It was to overcome them, to resist them. Somehow when they’re pressures, we say, ‘I’m only human . . . it’s not my fault I decided to steal.’ It is your fault. It’s always your fault. We might be sympathetic and understand why there was a heck of a lot of pressure on you, but let’s first start with: It’s your fault.”

A case in point: Lyle and Erik Menendez.

“Let’s assume they were truly abused,” the former law school professor says. “We don’t know that they were abused, but let’s assume that they were . . . how many people have grown up in terrible, horrible circumstances and overcome them? I believe it is the worse sort of prejudice to take someone who has a terrible or deprived background and as a result assume that they are going to misbehave.”

Personal responsibility is tied to our inability to feel shame and guilt in a healthy way, Josephson says.

“The Menendez brothers should be ashamed,” Josephson says. “They blew away their parents. This whole movement toward mental health instead of moral health has been an incredibly destructive trend.”

*

The victim-ization of America is remarkably egalitarian. From the addicts of the South Bronx to the self-styled emotional road-kills of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the mantra of the victims is the same: I am not responsible; it’s not my fault.

--Charles Sykes, author “A Nation of Victims”

*

We extend the bounds of the compulsive eating, sexual and shopping disorders discussed on daytime talk shows to include ourselves so we can blame the disorders and not ourselves.

“Compulsive shopping disorder is not buying a necktie every week,” says Dr. David Feinberg, professor at UCLA and director of the child and adolescent outpatient psychiatry department.

“It’s really defined as something that is clinically significant. It’s much more severe and intense than it gets portrayed. You might shop too much and you should budget better and you shouldn’t be spending so much on clothes. That’s not what we’re talking about, but the stuff that gets put out in a little blip in the media is [that] we now have a medicine for compulsive shopping. . . . It makes for great press because it sounds like something that everyone else has.”

There is an important, fundamental difference between explaining someone’s actions and excusing them. The explanation is useful in treatment, but rarely should it offer immunity from consequences, Feinberg says.

“A person with problems with drugs or alcohol might very well have been a victim in many ways, of society, of family. Psychologically, that’s where the focus of treatment should be, but that doesn’t give you immunity from what you did wrong.”

If we can’t blame drugs or alcohol or mental illness, who do we blame? We blame guns and Hollywood. We blame discrimination based on color, gender, age, sexual orientation. We blame the church and Washington. We blame O.J. and Ito. We blame victims.

We do not blame ourselves.

In an attempt to shift responsibility to the individual, government is moving toward three-strikes laws, toward the Personal Responsibility Act, the end of affirmative action requirements. What is missing from the equation is that the playing field still is uneven.

Many of us will strike out and fall through the cracks if the pendulum swings too far, says Msgr. Royale Vadakin, pastor of St. Anastasia Church in Playa del Rey and chairman of the Los Angeles-based Skirball Institute on American Values.

“We should focus on personal responsibility. It’s an essential dimension, but it doesn’t end there,” Vadakin says. “There has to be also the corporate, the community sense of responsibility.”

Vadakin praises those with the courage to do the right thing despite the consequences: The whistle-blowers who take a stand, risking their jobs and careers for the common good, that which is right.

He praises the residents of Le Chambon-Sur-Lignon, where French Huguenots banded together during the Holocaust to feed and protect Jews at great risk to their own lives.

*

Darryl Strawberry says he finally has accepted responsibility for his actions. Let’s hope he is sincere when he says he blames himself for his problems. Many people pray each day to hear such words from a loved one.

We have seen what he can do with a bat, and now it is time for him to show us what he can do without one. If he succeeds, it would prove to many of us that we, too, can overcome years of screwing up.