Being accountable.  What does that mean today?  Does it just mean showing up for your job on time and doing what you are paid to do?  Is it paying your bills by the due date?  Does it mean accepting the consequences of one’s actions?  What about moral accountability?  Do we even know what that entails?

It seems to me, in my limited life experiences, that today, people don’t consider the moral consequences of things as they did when I was growing up.  Then, if a person did wrong, that person was expected to say “I’m sorry.”  and then pay the appropriate consequence.  That could be anything from fixing something that was broken, to paying for something, or even making amends by first asking for forgiveness. The atonement could range from something very simple to something that carried deep regret.  However, there was one thing that was certain.  People were expected to account for their actions.  A person couldn’t just decide whether to be accountable or not.  And people seemed to agree on this.  The fact that accountability was non-negotiable was essential to the natural order of things.

Today, there is a serious lack of moral consideration in our culture.  Grown out of materialism or too much exposure to violence, to acceptance of many types of prejudices, and any number of other factors, culturally, we have become a society that values ownership of things and money and power more than it does kindness and compassion.  Collectively, this has altered our moral compass.  There is even a sense that it is perfectly fine to do whatever a person wants, just because that person may own more than someone else.  It asserts the term, “buying power” into the realm of social justice as something that can be “paid for” if one has enough money.

So what is moral accountability, anyway?  After researching the meaning of this term, I have found that honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion were named as major aspects of this definition.   This jives with my interpretation.  And these are the values that need to be reintroduced into American culture.  Accountability is collectively decided by the citizens of a society.  Maybe we should be thinking of ways to be accountable to each other as caring people, concerned with the well-being of all of our citizens.  My challenge, to myself, is to daily think about the ways in which I can contribute to this end.  If we can decide together, that money and power are not more important than people, then we will come to a place of accountability in this life that will serve us well in the next.