Why Are We All So Entitled?

There’s a Senior Center in my town which offers a free lunch every day. All you have to do is show up, produce a Medicare/Medicaid card and you eat as much as you want — 365 anno domini. You can even take some food home to eat later in the day.

After every meal, a couple of seniors march into the office of the Center’s Director to complain about the food. It was overcooked, it was undercooked, it needed more salt, less salt, something wasn’t right. The meal was free but so what?

Last year I worked briefly as a substitute teacher at the local public high school. Most of the kids came into my class wearing a hoodie, which has become the adolescent haute couture for both sexes, by the way. When I asked the kids to remove their hoodies in class I was told in no uncertain terms that they didn’t have to obey because it was their ‘right’ to dress any way they pleased.

I may be from somewhere in outer space, but the only ‘rights’ I thought we have are the ‘rights’ listed in the 1st Amendment, which give us the ‘right’ to free speech, free religion, free press, free assembly, and free petition. If there’s something about wearing hoodies in the Bill of Rights, I guess I need to go back and read that document again.

But lo and behold, we do seem to be entitled to all kinds of other rights, such as the right to free medical care…