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.