Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Enabling and being supportive are often considered the same thing, but in reality, they are vastly different. When you hear someone labeled as an “enabler” you often think of negative images. An enabler doesn’t help a person beat an addiction, they make an excuse for it, and in the process make the situation worse. That’s the negative connotation.
Enablers never see themselves as the “bad guy,” since their intention is always to help the person they’re enabling, even if their actions usually have the opposite result.
We live in an era of enabling. It’s become a national pastime for too many people, and the safety net that societies should provide for their most vulnerable citizens has become so all-encompassing, that it’s become an expected service for those looking for an easy way out.
You don’t have to look very far to find enabling behavior. If you’re a teacher, you find it descending to your classroom from the front office in an endless array of requirements for staff that do nothing for the student, but create a paper trail in the event of potential lawsuits in our litigiously insane society for the district.
It takes valuable instructional time away from students, wears the teacher out with these incessant demands and all that effort is rarely, if ever, looked at unless a snowplow parent barges into the district with an attorney in tow.
It does get tiring. That’s why the teacher shortage is at an all-time high and growing with each passing day.
It’s not just teachers, you’ll find nurses and police officers suffering the same ill-conceived micro-management from the pencil pushers that make policy. It’s the reason there are hundreds of thousands of jobs waiting for prospective nurses and police officers nationwide, with over a million teaching vacancies, and why many continue to leave those professions.
The societal crutch is necessary for those who need it but is so abused by the slackers that the metaphoric crutch is being used to bludgeon those who actually seek to help.
It makes no sense, but it does make dollars and cents when a creative attorney can grind out a few million bucks from a local school district, city government, or hospital. The attorney gets a large percentage of the award, whether it’s justified or not, and it’s a target-rich environment.
You don’t see many American kids studying to become physicians, teachers, engineers, or entering law enforcement, but the law colleges are full.
It is supply and demand in a society that has become untenable, and largely out of control.
It might seem odd, but look at something as inane as driving a car. Auto theft is at an all-time high in the USA, and thieves have preferred models brought on by enabling.
The number one stolen vehicle in America is a 2006 F-Series Ford Pickup with approximately 40,000 taken in the first six months of 2023. The GMC Sierra is a close third, sandwiched around a 2000 Honda Civic. Just to tick off you Ford guys, it’s the only area where Ford pickups beat Chevy’s in my humble opinion.
Various Toyota and Honda models round out the top 10, with full-size Dodge pickups taking the 10th spot. There were 11,000 Dodge pickups stolen through the end of June this year nationwide.
In Wyoming, the Ford F-150 is the top dog among car thieves, outnumbering almost all of the others combined.
There are a few Ford, Chevy, and Dodge trucks that are theft-proof. No, they don’t have advanced detection systems, alarms, or special locks. They have something much more traditional as a theft defense mechanism, they have manual transmissions.
Vehicles with manual transmissions are almost never stolen. The reason is simple. Criminals always take the easy way out. With a life of enabling behavior behind them they’ve never taken the time to do anything difficult, and driving a stick is much more challenging to a novice driver than just slapping the shift lever to “D” and taking off.
An entire generation of Americans is largely unable to drive a manual transmission, even with a simple three or four-speed shift between the front seats. Imagine kids today trying to learn to drive with the old “three on the tree” style shift levers of the 1960s and 70s.
What is even more surprising is how few teenagers want to drive at all. A generation or two ago, driving meant freedom and every 16-year-old in America was at the DMV on their birthday.
Today, estimates are that over half of teenagers in the USA don’t want to learn to drive.
Yes, it’s another example of enabling behavior, this time by parents who spend much of their time as private chauffeurs for their little darlings.
Why drive, when someone else will take you wherever you want to go and foot the bill for gas, registration, insurance, maintenance and will change a flat tire for you while you play with your phone?
We have accommodations for “furries” in public schools. Kids can identify as a cat and enabling administrators force teachers to let them sit on a pad instead of at a desk.
Boys can compete as girls because they defy reality and identify as female. They win a lot more races in the pool and on the track while cheating young women out of athletic opportunities in the process, but the enablers have made it easy to switch genders when it benefits you rather than put in the extra work to compete.
We live in an age where every extremist fetish must be protected, and too often, encouraged by our institutions. Yes, it is insanity at the highest level.
Imagine trying to explain a furry to someone fighting to keep their family alive during the Dust Bowl or the dark days of World War II. That would entail some professional level enabling to get them to think you’re telling the truth.
In an era where people are more concerned with how many cup holders a car has than the power of the engine, how long the transmission will last, and the cost of maintenance we shouldn’t be surprised.
Somewhere on the path to the modern day we’ve lost the trail of responsibility for our own actions, we’ve lost focus on the fundaments and chosen to chase the bright lights and follow the loudest bells and whistles.
Is anyone surprised that the people who work on the edge of the societal spear are quitting in droves rather than trying to adjust to the idiocy?
Nurses, teachers, and cops are in the trenches, they are the point of that societal spear, and it is getting dull with the exponential onslaught forced on them by those who live beyond the realm of reality.
Enabling never helped anyone. But if you brazenly tell someone the truth, it is viewed as a hostile act and you’re the one who will suffer consequences.
For my entire teaching career, I had the quote “Onward, into the fog,” above my whiteboard.
It seems a fitting expression of where we are headed.