In an article on the Huffington Post website, Caroline Bologna talks about the importance of parents teaching accountability to their children.
She starts off with the following: “We’re living in a time and place in which it often seems the people in charge have no sense of accountability... whether it’s governors rejecting mask mandates and other public health measures aimed at keeping people safe, or leaders failing to own up to their role in big and small failures. On an everyday level, many adults don’t understand the consequences of their actions and refuse to acknowledge when they’ve made mistakes. And as always, our children are watching. So perhaps now, more than ever, is the time for parents to focus on teaching kids about accountability.”
This commentator certainly agrees with the statement. Those who have seen my three-part video on what constitutes freedom know that consequence or responsibility is an essential part of what makes up freedom, along with choice and individuality.
You, as an individual, make choices, so you bear the responsibility or consequence of those choices, both positive and negative. You show up at work, that’s a choice. You work a full shift doing what you’re supposed to do, that’s a choice. You get paid for that work, that’s a positive consequence. You don’t show up at work or you don’t work that full shift or you don’t do the work you’re supposed to do, that’s still a choice. You not getting paid for that work that you didn’t do is a negative consequence.
Accountability is owning up to and taking responsibility for the bad choices. It also means holding up others to their bad choices. In other words, it’s not enough to not get paid for the work that you chose to not do. Your supervisor, manager, or boss also has to speak with you about that, and, if it is a habitual bad choice, then they have to fire you and replace you with someone who will do that work.
The problem is that we are not doing that. We are not holding people to account.
There are far too many people that believe themselves to be entitled to do whatever they want with zero accountability. This commentator sees them on the road every single day. The guy who thinks him driving an oversized pickup truck or an Audi means he’s entitled to drive 90-miles an hour in the middle of a congested highway. The ones who treat the breakdown lane as their personal lane when there’s a traffic jam.
We’re seeing it now with people who throw temper tantrums and fights on airlines. People who make terrorist threats against others over a mask mandate in the middle of a deadly global pandemic. We have banks that engage in fraudulent activity, that causes harm to others, and yet not one person goes to prison over it. And they not only get caught doing it, but then they get caught doing it again and again, and still with no accountability whatsoever.
And we are definitely seeing it now with governors, state legislators, members of Congress, and even a certain narcissistic former President of the United States, who act recklessly, destructively, and with wanton disregard to the lives and safety of others.
Governors are demanding no new mask mandates be enacted in their states, nor do they want any private means to require either vaccination or proof of vaccination for businesses, while not only in the middle of a deadly global pandemic, but one that has surged with an even deadlier new variant that is overwhelming hospitals. They are blatantly guilty of negligent genocide, and yet they will never be held to account for their criminal activities.
Jingoistic media personalities are telling their viewers to rip off the masks of other people and accuse parents who have their children of wearing masks to be child abusers and to have them reported. There are several instances where this has actually happened. The people who engaged in the assaults have been arrested and charged. But the jingoistic media personalities who pushed for committing criminal acts haven’t.
Once upon a time, scandals and the threat of impeachment would cause any politician to step down. Not anymore. We impeached a sitting president not once, but twice, including a charge of inciting a domestic terrorist attack against the Congress. A member of Congress is being investigated for underage sex trafficking, but he acts like it’s nothing. Newly-elected members of the Senate and even seasoned members of the Senate are engaged in insider trading, but think nothing of it and are allowed to get away with it.
And if all this is allowed, then how the hell can we teach children to be accountable?
The next generation look to the current generations for guidance. If they see what we do, then they think it’s okay to do it as well. Remember those old anti-drug commercials where the parent demands their child answer who told them doing drugs was okay and the child screams “it’s you, Dad! I learned it from you”? Well, we did, and so did the generations that follow. If we think it’s okay to drive aggressively and recklessly, then the next generation will think the same. If we think our elected officials should be allowed to lie, cheat, steal, commit criminal offenses with impunity, then our next generation will think the same.
Let’s get brutally honest here... we cannot... absolutely *can* *not*... expect the next generation to be accountable if we do not do the same to our own today! We cannot teach the next generation that which we ourselves refuse to be. They see our hypocrisy and learn it to be normal.
That means we need to see prosecutions and arrests of those who engage in criminal activity, especially those that sit in or have sat in positions of power. That means that the former President of the United States *needs* to be criminally charged for his acts and not be excused under some BS made-up “tradition” like CNN’s Jeffrey “Zoom Junk” Toobin insists. That means going after the reckless self-entitled drivers and the anti-mask terrorists and the banks that defraud. That means condemning the jingoistic media personalities that preach anti-vaccination and anti-mask efforts while their own employers do the opposite.
Yes there are the occasional rare exceptions where we do something right. But for every Harvey Weinstein or Derek Chauvin, there are plenty of others who get away with their acts. And we think nothing of it. That has to stop.
Teaching people to be responsible means holding them to it when they do wrong. Those of us who truly support freedom know that it’s not just about doing whatever the hell you want without consequence. The next generation learns from our own, just like we did from the ones before us. If we want the next generation to be better than us, then we need to break from that now.
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