Are You Accountable?

Accountability is not for others; it is for you. You are accountable to God and yourself when you decide to take or reject responsibility, whether a job, home, defending our country, starting a family, putting up with big pressure, holding your tongue, making ends meet, or all of the above.

Robert B. Charles, Mark Twain and Education

Unhappiness From Not Accepting Responsibilities

The unhappy…often seek to destroy their societies. The primary reason is that they attribute their unhappiness to society, not to their own attitudes and choices, the tragedies that periodically darken even happy lives, or their own inability or unwillingness to improve their lot in life.

Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.408.

Be Responsible for Yourself!

If a person is being held down by a problem that can only be fixed by taking responsibility, it is time for that person to stop blaming others for the problem.

Erwin W. Lutzer, We Will Not Be Silenced, pg.94

People ARE Responsible For Their Actions

But choices are mental and spiritual matters. The unproven psychological theories of unconscious drives over which a person has no control are simply mechanisms for excusing irresponsible, immature, and undisciplined behavior and thinking.

Ed Bulkley, Ph.D., Why Christians Can’t Trust Psychology, pg.114

Don’t Be a Snowflake

If passive objects bother you, it’s because you let them bother you--and that’s on you. It is not your fault some racist back in the 1930s paid for a statue of Stonewall Jackson because he wanted to intimidate black people. But it’s your responsibility to keep it from affecting the things you want to do to be successful.

By taking responsibility for your own state of mind, you abandon the idea of victim hood, the concept that other people are capable of holding you back and that society is fixed to prevent you from succeeding.

The victimhood mentality is completely incompatible with the sense of responsibility that creates success. It’s a handicap, but unlike a physical or mental disability, it’s avoidable. …

The victimhood mentality is like black mold in the basement of a house--once even a little bit takes hold, it starts to spread and eat away at structures. And there is only one person who can really protect you from its deleterious affects: you.

No Safe Spaces, edited by Dennis Prager and Mark Joseph, pg.235

Responsibility?

Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?

Thomas Sowell on Twitter, 6/1/20

Choose Wisely

Much of life is shaped by choices we make. We do not choose what happens to us; we choose how to react to what happens to us.

Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis: God, Creation, and Destruction, pg.431

The Danger of the “#MeToo” Movement

The #MeToo movement has uncovered real abuses of power. But the solution to those abuses is not to replace valid measures of achievement with irrelevancies like gender and race. Ironically, the best solution to sexual predation is not more feminism, but less. By denying the differences between men and women, and by ridiculing the manly virtues of gentlemanliness and chivalry and the female virtues of modesty and prudence, feminism dissolved the civilizational restraints on the male libido. The boorish behavior that pervades society today would have been unthinkable in the past, when a traditional understanding of sexual propriety prevailed. Now, however, with the idea of “ladies and gentlemen” discredited and out of favor, boorishness is increasingly the rule.

Heather MacDonald, “The Negative Impact of the #MeToo Movement”

If You Are Poor, It is YOUR Fault

No one can blame a person if he starts out in life poor, because how one starts out is not his fault. If he stays poor, he is to blame because it is his fault. Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior.

Walter Williams, “Dependency, Not Poverty”

A Nation of Irresponsibility: “It’s not my fault!”

No longer are there any moral absolutes that govern our relationships with one another. We are no longer accountable to anyone, and certainly not to God. We have become a nation of irresponsible people. Drug addicts blame their condition on drug dealers; alcoholics say their problem is a disease; pornographers say they are just meeting the demands of the people; homosexuals say it is the fault of their genes; rapists say they got the urge from movies; and abortions happen because everyone does it. All of our problems are due to someone else or something else. If we can’t think of anyone else to blame, we can always say, “the devil made me do it.”

We have become a nation of blameless, guiltless people who have confused liberation with democracy so that we can no longer discern freedom from responsibility, or good from evil. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn stated it well when he said: “When Western society was established, it was based on the idea that each individual limited his own behavior. Everyone understood what he could do and what he could not do. The law itself did not restrain people. Since then, the only thing we have been developing is rights, rights, rights, at the expense of duty.”

Hope MacDonald, The Flip Side of Liberation: A Call to Traditional Values, pg.139

Wall of Shame?

I wonder if an invisible wall of shame is being built around this nation in the name of liberation. Have we fallen for a counterfeit freedom that is locking us into a prison of hopeless depravity? Are we becoming a people ruled by the ever-changing winds of general consensus in which each person does what is right in his or her own eyes?

In this liberated age have we forgotten that freedom by itself is never free—is never enough? It must always be accompanied by responsibility. No society in history ever survived when its rights became separated from its responsibilities. Has our nation’s newly acquired lifestyle enticed us into a perverted sense of freedom so that now we are held fast in a prison of liberation?

Hope MacDonald, The Flip Side of Liberation: A Call to Traditional Values, pg.14

Consequences of Actions

There’s a story told of a father whose son repeatedly caused trouble and chaos in the family. After each painful incident, he would come to his father, say, “I’m sorry, Dad,” and his father would forgive him. But the boy seemed cavalier about his sins. He acted as if he felt entitled to forgiveness, as if all one has to do is say, “I’m sorry,” and the incident is over as if it never happened. The young man seemed to have no awareness of the suffering his sin and rebellion caused his mother and father.

So the father said to the son, “Let’s go out to the garage. I want to show you something.” In the garage, the father took a hammer and nail, and he pounded the nail into the garage wall. Then he handed the hammer to his son and said, “Now, son, I want you to pull out the nail”

The son shrugged, used the claw end of the hammer, and pulled out the nail.

The father said, “That’s like forgiveness, isn’t it? When you do something wrong, it’s like pounding in a nail. Forgiveness is when you pull the nail out again.”

“Yeah,” the son said. “I can see that.”

“Fine,” said the father. “Now, I want you to take that hammer and pull out the nail hole.”

The startled young man said, “But I can’t make the hole go away!” And then his father’s meaning became clear. Forgiveness can erase the offense, but it cannot erase the consequences. Sin and folly always produce consequences that do not go away, even by forgiveness.

Ray C. Stedman, For Such A Time As This: Secrets of Strategic Living from the Book of Esther, pg.55-56.

Responsibility is Lacking in Today's Culture

“Responsibility” poses a quandary for us today, as it presupposes a standard toward which to be responsible. But as standards have been attacked as products of “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “imperialism,” and other nefarious forces, the notion of duty has steadily vanished.

The result has been a growing sense of entitlement and narcissism. Consider the widespread hostility toward a recent proposal to eliminate loan “forgiveness” for graduate students. The policy would stop the government from “forgiving” student loan debt after a certain number of years. The idea is that, if one is privileged enough to go to graduate school, one who isn’t shouldn’t be forced to pay for the one who is.

However, one outlet described the idea as a “sick joke. A billionaire president and billionaire education secretary, neither of whom spent a single day of their lives in public service before stumbling their way into positions of immense power, are targeting a program that’s basically meant to make life in underpaid government work a little more tenable.”

Only a mindset that says “I am entitled to graduate school on another’s dime” would argue that preventing other people from being forced to pay for (“forgive”) another’s loan is a “sick joke.” Furthermore, the idea that “public service”—meaning government employment—is nobler than private-sector work is only further evidence of our cultural entitlement. Private markets create wealth, products, and jobs, which improve lives. Government merely consumes the wealth private markets create. That those who consume feel entitled to the wealth created by others is the height of the narcissism that pervades modern society.

Without standards of virtue which transcend the self, the self becomes the standard. At that point, as Protagoras remarked, “Man is the measure of all things.” In today’s culture, that is increasingly so.

David Weinberger, “We Don’t Have An Income Inequality Problem, We Have An Ego Problem”