Accountability Pt 1
I’m not allowed to bring my coat into the office where I work. They gave us lockers, but I usually just leave it in my car on the passenger seat on a pile of empty water bottles so it looks sort of like there’s a dog sleeping under it. Thankfully, it was an eerily warm winter, and I never froze solid on my way from the car to the office. Apparently, I can’t be trusted not to write data on a sticky note and squirrel it away in my pocket while no one’s looking. I’m not even allowed to be accountable for not committing a felony while I’m at work. And I’ve been working there for five and a half years. Crazy! Oh, and apparently it's impossible to fit a sticky note in your pants' pocket, because I'm allowed to wear pants.
When I was a teacher, I couldn’t be trusted to decide what my students needed to learn and how best to teach them. Sure I went to seven years of college and amassed three degrees to prepare myself for teaching, but some douchebag in Harrisburg with zero hours of teaching experience, zero credits in education, and zero knowledge of my students had a much firmer grasp on the situation. Thank goodness he was there to set us all straight. Why is this life? Why would the school or the company hire me if they don’t trust me to do the right thing? When did this happen? When did we lose control of our own lives, our own thoughts, our own challenges?
Our culture shuffles accountability like a six of spades in a deck of cards, and dear Holy Ghost it’s maddening. We’ve taken the word “accountability” and twisted it all up into a knot of negativity. No one wants to be held accountable. In today’s world, accountability means blame and shame and guilt when things go wrong. It’s powerless -- a screw-up. It’s shame. And yeah that’s maybe part of it, but accountability also means freedom, honesty, and knowledge. And I think that’s pretty awesome.
I think accountability means to internalize life’s challenges, beauties, and struggles and to honestly integrate them into your vision of life. And our contemporary American culture is eroding it all away. It was once the centerpiece of what it meant to be an American. When America was young and restless, if you didn’t work hard or work smart, then you didn’t eat or have a roof over your head. And there was no doubt about it, it was your fault. And there was freedom in that. Not just shame and hardship.
Now, we live in a world where marriage is practically a sham, with a 50/50 shot at divorce and more and more couples avoiding it altogether, and our children are being raised by tablets and computer apps. How did this happen? It’s because we stripped away the average American’s need for accountability. It’s because this culture we’re building tramples on every individual’s efforts to understand what they’re capable of and to connect with other people and the world in real and meaningful ways. I’m not saying we should go back to 1847. No way. But accountability is something we’re losing along the way to a “better” world. And it’s sad.
You’re the only person who will ever know what it’s like to be you. So you have a great responsibility, just like I do, to learn the lessons life teaches, soak up all the emotions, think your own thoughts, form your own opinions, make your own decisions, and become the person that you have the unending potential to be. It’s a burden to be alive, but it’s also a miracle in every sense of the word. If you find yourself in a difficult spot, then you just have to work harder, think smarter, plan savvier. If you screw-up, you gotta learn from it, adjust your path, and carry on. You’re strong. Be strong. You’re smart. Be smart.
There’s no perfect world, no perfect environment for each of us to thrive in. Not in this life anyway. God isn’t just a Gardener who plants each of us in perfect sun and waters us the perfect amount and feeds the soil at the just right time. He plants us out in the wild and gives us thorns and floods and weeds to make us stronger. We each have to learn and grow and struggle, just like everyone else, to produce the fruit that we were born for.
There are many reasons accountability is becoming a lost art. Here are just a few…
Service Industries
Division of Labor is a good thing, a great thing, a brilliant thing, actually, but I believe it’s also harmed us in fundamental ways. The division of labor has created service jobs even entire industries devoted to helping Americans live the way we want to live – contractors, plumbers, restaurants, shopping malls, department stores, mechanics – all providing services for us so we can focus on other things. And now, if we don’t want to, we never learn how to fix a car or repair a furnace, for example. We pay someone to do it for us. Genius. But it also takes power out of our hands.
Since God isn’t a Gardener that removes all of life’s little weeds and thorns, we try to pay for them to go away and build a culture that removes them, because we don’t want to be responsible for it all ourselves. And now that I have no knowledge of how a furnace works, I have to pay a guy to check it every year and replace it when it’s old and fix it when it breaks. But I’ve lost control of my own money. That money is no longer mine. I’ve chosen to give it to someone else.
Well…maybe I took some control over my own time. But here’s the rub. We’ve created a world where we no longer have the time to learn to fix our furnace. We rely on the HVAC guy so much that we’ve filled up all our time with other stuff. Mostly work. But also other commitments like friends, family, church, hobbies, etc. So now, if I don’t have the money to pay for it, my furnace either doesn’t get fixed, or I’m forced to sacrifice something important in my life so I can get it done myself. Now I’m powerless. Now, I’m directed by external forces that are beyond my understanding. Now, I’m a victim. When my furnace breaks, I’m at the mercy of unseen events -- a relentless weed that sucks away all my time – the very stuff of life. I no longer have the strength, knowledge, resilience, or adaptability to overcome this challenge in my life. So I become a victim. And part of me withers and dies. And over time, as these challenges stack up, I start to see the world that way, through the eyes of a victim.
Division of labor also happens where you work. They give you a task and some responsibilities, and then they micromanage the crap out of you. And they tell you it’s your responsibility, but you don’t get to make any decisions. The decisions are made by some cloud somewhere floating around in space…and oh, what? You have questions about this decision? Go ask the cloud. And then if one of those things that you’re “responsible” for goes haywire, then you’re held over the fire. You’re held accountable. And accountability puts you out of a job and struggling to make ends meet. And you hate accountability. You want to punch it in the face, and it soooo deserves it.
And you’re a victim.
Medical Industry
Seven years ago, I was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, and the doctor put me on a drug called Methotrexate. Six months later, I moved and started going to a different doctor. He told me, “You know you can’t have kids when you’re on Methotrexate.” I had absolutely no idea. The old doctor never told me. And even after he told me that, I still wasn’t sure what it meant. Was I sterile? Did it mean birth defects? After about a year on the drug, it started damaging my liver, so I decided to take control of my own health and pursue a more holistic approach. It was one of the best decisions of my life. I had to sort of take shelter from the hurricane of the American medical industry and take back accountability for my own health. I started reading books about my condition and watching youtube videos. I overhauled my diet (for almost a year, I ate 85% raw fruits and vegetables) and implemented a more practical and consistent workout regimen. It wasn’t the doctors’ fault or my parents’ fault or the drug manufacturer’s fault, or my Insurance provider’s fault that I was in pain. It was my fault. But I was also the only one who could really fix it.
I’m not saying this is the right path for everybody, but it opened my eyes to what our medical industry has done to us. It has made us dependent on insurance providers, doctors, and medication. Medicine, tests, and procedures are now so impossibly expensive that you could never afford it all yourself, so you simply have to have medical insurance. And now, we’ve even made it illegal not give up ownership of your own health to some corporation. Are we crazy? Once you do that, choices, knowledge, and control start to slip out of your grasp, and you just swirl around in the wind of it.
How much ownership do you have over your own health? How many choices do you really have? How much do you know about and how well do you understand your medical insurance provider, your policy, your prescription plan? How much do you know about the drugs you’re taking, the procedures that are done to you, the tools going inside you, and the doctors who put them there? How much do those doctors care about you, your disease, your situation? They want you to have weeds popping up around you. They might cut them down for you, but they want them to keep creeping back in. It’s a menace of our design.
I’ve become a victim of my own body. And so have you. We all have mental and physical health problems that require monitoring, testing, medication, procedures, etc. And medical bills are astronomical, because we’re paying for an industry to operate, we’re funding new medical technology, and we’re paying for malpractice insurance. And some of these ailments we have make us unaccountable for our own actions. I can’t work, because I have a disability. I’m abusive, because I have a hormone imbalance. I can’t help it. It’s beyond my control. That's just who I am. I’m a victim of my own body. And over time, it starts to gives us the outlook of a victim. And that’s just how we see the world.
Don’t be a victim. Rise above that shit.
