While we bear responsibility for our problems, the caricature of Mexico being propagated in the United States only increases the despair on both sides of the Rio Grande.
And in that way we come to realize that we bear responsibility for every child, because we're counting on everybody else to help look after ours, that we're all parents, that they are all our children.
In the process, it poses profound questions, from whether we bear responsibility for the sins of our fathers, to the individual's ability and obligation to apply the lessons of history to their own lives.
"We are a country that took 50 years to say we bear responsibility for what happened to the Jews during World War II," Mr. Pujol said, alluding to the formal apology by President Jacques Chirac in 1995, the first by a French president for France's role in deporting Jews.
If we are nothing but a bag of genes and chemicals, as Steven Pinker, Francis Crick, and others have famously written, do we bear responsibility for our own actions?
Or, in the words of President Obama, "We come to realize that we bear responsibility for every child, because we're counting on everybody else to help look after ours, that we're all parents, that they are all our children".
And we bear responsibility for that.
We bear responsibility for every child..
Does this then mean that God has formed us in a certain way, for good or bad, and we bear no responsibility for who we've become?
Whether we voted for Bush or have passively shrugged at Obama's inaction, we bear some responsibility for the torture committed on our behalf and in our name.
