Personal Responsibility

When Louise Macnair, a widow who is now 93, crashed to the floor in the front room of her home, she knew the time had come "to push that button."She did, and within minutes, the people at Lifeline Systems Inc., the oldest and largest personal emergency response system, called the neighbor Macnair had designated as a "responder." Soon both the neighbor and an ambulance arrived.Macnair spent the next five months hospitalized with one complication after another from what turned out to be a broken hip. But in May 1995, to her great delight, she returned to the life she loved -- living alone in her own home in Cambridge, Mass.

BOSTON -- Now that we have repealed welfare, I have a modest proposal. Let's go all the way and rescind childhood.Childhood has become far too burdensome for the American public to bear. It isn't good for the country. It isn't even good for children who are captured in an unwholesome and prolonged state of dependency.The whole idea of childhood, it should be remembered, is nothing but an anachronistic leftover from the original liberals. Before the so-called Enlightenment, before Rousseau, before the left-wing conspiracy of 18th-century do-gooders, the young were dressed, worked and looked upon as short adults.

BOSTON -- This one is for Priscilla Parten, the Derry, N.H., woman who had the temerity to ask Lamar Alexander who would care for the elderly if the budget is cut according to the GOP pattern.The answer from the presidential candidate, one of the men hawking their wares across New Hampshire was that ''We're going to have to accept more personal responsibility in our own families for reading to our children and caring for our parents, and that's going to be inconvenient and difficult.''Happy New Year, Priscilla and open up your calendar.

I DID NOT SUPPORT the Million Man March. I did not share the jubilation in anticipation of the convergence on Washington. And even if Minister Farrakhan had invited women, this black woman could not and would not have marched.I could understand, but not affirm, the efforts by those who said they would march, but do not support Minister Farrakhan and disagree with his politics. I could not set aside Minister Farrakhan's years of racism, gay-bashing, sexism, and anti-Semitism. I was deeply troubled to hear some of my longtime allies explaining that the march was "bigger than Farrakhan," and I was comforted by knowing that Mary Frances Berry (the chairwoman of the U.S. Com mission on Civil Rights)

A state test given to Maryland schoolchildren must be revised because Baltimore's school system has breached security by publishing test questions in a teachers' guide.State school officials called the action a "breach of test security" and a copyright infringement. They are investigating whether the use of actual test questions was deliberate or inadvertent, and plan to bill the city school system for the cost of revising the exam, currently estimated at $2,000. City school officials also are investigating.

MILLION MAN March? If Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan really wants to send a message, let him detour the whole entourage up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to a neighborhood like Baltimore County's Sudbrook.A community of modest, well-kept homes in a northwest slice of the county, it's as middle America as you'll find. Dads shooting baskets on driveways with their kids after work. Moms chatting over the back fence. Teens mowing lawns. Folks washing their cars and tending hedgerows.

It's an old saw that you can't legislate morality. Yet the new GOP majority in Congress seems determined to enact sweeping reforms aimed at restoring ''accountability'' and ''personal responsibility'' to those who receive welfare benefits.There is a good bit of self-righteousness and hypocrisy here masquerading as public policy. The fact is, Congress only wants to make some people more ''accountable'' and ''responsible.''Americans overwhelmingly say they are opposed to ''welfare.'' But when Social Security, unemployment insurance and other forms of assistance are taken into account fully half of all non-farm households in the U.S. receive benefits from one or more government programs.

In recent months, it seems as if newsmakers have made an art form of shrugging off responsibility: Baseball player Darryl Strawberry has blamed his alcoholism and drug addiction on the demands of being a celebrity. Erik and Lyle Menendez say they were abused by their parents and therefore not guilty of their murders. And when tennis star Jennifer Capriati was arrested recently for possessing marijuana, her father took the public rap by saying he pushed her too hard to compete when she was young.

Led by a youth carrying a large wooden crucifix, more than 200 people walked last night to the Northeast Baltimore convent where Sister MaryAnn Glinka was murdered and prayed for the world's sinners and unfortunates."

IF YOU'VE been listening to the babble from the Bush administration, you would think that the notion of personal responsibility is something foreign or new to most of the African-American community. It has become a code phrase for "what's wrong with those people?" and is sprinkled liberally throughout analyses of why the uprising in Los Angeles happened.Photos and videotape shot during the violence have inspired several commentators to intone that what's needed now in the black community is "a sense of personal responsibility."