Sometimes we have to lose
someone or something before we understand how much we miss the person or
thing. Some of the biggest complainers about their spouse are the
loudest criers when the person passes away. Some of the greatest
squawkers for authoritarian rule in a democracy are the ones most
terrified when their freedoms are yanked away. In the Old Testament
(Psalms 137), the arrogant back slidden children of Israel so well
described by the prophet Amos only wept when they found themselves in
Babylon.
One day in America we will regret supporting the age of
public unaccountability we are moving into full bloom and miss the days
everyone was at least publicly accountable. No one as a public norm was
above the law at least in elected or in appointed office be it in
government, faith, education, media, or business . If you were nonwhite
or poor , that’s a different story in too many not all cases but you
get my drift.
Meaning, you know the days in which no one was
above the law. If you got caught telling a lie, you were fired from your
job. If you got convicted of a crime, you went to prison. If you beat
your spouse or slept with the underaged, or was a public drunk, you
could not get or keep a political or any other post. An age in which
integrity and your good name meant every thing.
Those of us who
have lived long enough to know how it was to live in a time of public
accountability grasp what I mean hopefully. We of course had the
dishonest and the unscrupulous among us but they were held at bay by
enforced public norms of accountability. You just knew if you got caught
in a lie you would not get hired or keep your job. If you made an
obscene gesture or made a derogatory remark in public or got caught on
tape in private, you were shamed and fired in disgrace.
That sort
of public accountability society began to slowly crumble in the late
1960s with full blooming occurring occurring between 2016 and
2025.Traditionally, we Americans tend to look up to our Presidents as
symbols of public accountability though now tainted progressively by
their public disgraces and huge lies regarding, for the most part,
careless if not genocidal warmaking and grave moral indiscretions
starting with Lyndon B. Johnson through twice elected Donald Trump.
It
helps to explain why it is in this nearly sixty years period of gradual
erosion of public accountability, the unprecedented pushes for internal
human rights have had limited, fragile, and temporary positive results
increasingly erased altogether . So many of those in national and
state/ local government and civil society power irrespective of gender,
ethnic ancestry, and political party affiliation have played games,
marginalized, and excluded policies of substance when it comes to human
rights for the historically degraded.
This is because since our
colonial era, American public accountability has been a privileged white
male norm easily broken when it comes to white women and nonwhites.
This was about to change in the 1960s but was derailed for the reasons
given and others worthy of unpacking one day especially the tacit
insidious resistance in America from our treetops to our roots to admit
and take full responsibilities of inequalities especially race and
gender which so drastically dehumanize all of us and extinguish them
completely and permanently out of the fabric of our collective being as a
democracy.
What is most worrisome is what this present age of
full bloom unaccountability is teaching our children, grandchildren, and
great grandchildren since they have grown up in times of increasing
unaccountability as public norms. Indeed,the clear danger already here,
not just coming, is unaccountability as public norm is actually all they
see and know for modeling their lives. Thus, it is ok now to treat
students in all levels like customers so give them what they want. Let
them use AI to write their papers. No harm done. Go ahead and get a
divorce since it is nobody’s fault. No one can tell you what to do, just
do it like the six year old who packed his piece and blew away his
teacher or just stay on social media bragging about how drunk you stay
no matter you got kicked out of the military as a promising womanizing
married officer and your last job in your forties. And just vote even
against your interest or don’t vote.
Very quickly in this full
bloom era of public unaccountability we will become like the children in
Israel in Babylon wishing for public accountability most Americans have
only read about or heard about. But before that happens we will have to
experience the outcomes of living in a lawless society in which if you
have privilege, white female/male ancestry, or not, you can do your
own thing with immunity from consequences which come along anyways
eventually biting you in the tail and thus bite all of us in our
societal seat.