What the Left gets Right: Accountability Matters.

In my second June post, I reflected briefly on accountability, and have been thinking about it in broader light than I used to ever since. It's not just that church, like I mentioned in my last post, seems to be evading accountability. It's that their are simply mirroring the culture even the calls for accountability have grown louder and more dire the last few years. This initially seemed like a really good thing to me--finally, something might be done about the mounting levels of dysfunction, injustice, division, and social engineering in our society are unreal! The level of corruption at all the levels has gotten suffocating for people who care about honesty and fairness. The depletion of basic respect is reaching unbearable levels for people who value community and being part of something bigger than themselves and their tiny identities/affinities. The caving of a common narrative to the toxic, anything-goes morality is demoralizing to those who know that there is objective truth. The displacement of common sense by self worship is grating for those who honor intellectual care and reality. Society seems to be being demolished, which is painful and grievous enough. My heart cries for accountability.

Except, the loudest calls for accountability unfortunately seem to be doublespeak. Despite the increasingly urgent demands for accountability, the devastation of so many of the blessings and unprecedented comforts  we've enjoyed in the West for the last three-ish decades continues unabated. No one is being held accountable for taking down our society to the studs (and then burning those to the ground as well). In the Leftist spaces I'm in, there is a lot of talk about what used to be called "safe spaces." Because of both the natural evolution of language and culture as well as the Leftist push to redefine words and inflate definitions in an attempt to defy/deny reality and avoid having to answer for their destructive policies and actions, "safe space" is one of many phrases that are quickly changing. I don't really hear a lot about "safe spaces" anymore. It was "brave spaces" for a while; now, it seems for the time being, we are trying to create "liberated spaces." (No wonder "'the work' (mostly referring to anti-racism work) is never done;" it's enough just to keep up with the constantly shifting language that is and is not "allowed.")

In these "liberated spaces," the recitation at the beginning of every one of them is about accountability, vulnerability, and empowerment, where everyone is welcome just as they are. Of course, this is a different kind of language game: the Leftist version of irony except with a twist: saying the opposite of what you mean not to make your point but to cover up what you actually mean (which is how some people experience irony/sarcasm anyway). There is no way everyone is safe and welcome to be vulnerable in a liberated space. There is no way everyone is going to be equally held to account, either.

We all know that the people who get the privileges of the vulnerability part, which include behaving inappropriately/immaturely in any setting, emotional manipulation and gaslighting, highjacking any meeting wherein real work needs to get done, and holding venues and platforms intended for other purposes hostage while they pepper the audience with their own personal woes and blame for them, are only people who look a certain way. And that the demands and threats of the latter are aimed at those who do not look that certain way. All in the name of not judging people by their physical characteristics, AKA anti-racism. The extent of the "responsibilities" that certain group affinities need to take seem to be amounting to rage, disrupting systems wherever possible, and calling people out in whatever manner they deem necessary, feeling completely entitled to excuse themselve s from common decency and civil respect, apparently.

The weirdest thing to me in all of this is that, in the context of the constant, urgent demands for "accountability, "personal responsibility" has become a "right-wing" buzzword. But how can you have accountability without personal responsibility? That's called magical thinking. The Left's demands for accountability primarily in the name of reparations (I don't hear the word "reconciliation" anymore when it comes to race, now that I think about it) seems quite hypocritical. I'm all for accountability, but the rule-of-law kind, the kind that holds people in a civilized society equally.