Accountability...

Hey everyone. Hope everyone had a great MLK day. You did? And what did you do? If you were like most of us you did what you do on any other holiday, which is nothing. Sat around in your boxers (or panties for you women out there), scratched your ass and watched TV. Maybe you even rented Roots, or, as Chris Rock suggests, read a Jet. I happened to be one of those people in my boxers actually, though I took a nice walk with my girlfriend down in the Village of New York City. However as I walked around the frozen city, there was one word that was bouncing back and forth in my mind, and that word was accountability.

And as I was thinking of this word, by sheer coincidence we happened to pass the funeral home where the body of Nixzmary Brown was being laid to rest. For those you don't know the story, Nixzmary was a 7-year old New Yorker who was horribly abused by her mother and step-father and finally died from her injuries last week. The story is one of those unfortunate tales too often told in poor 'hoods around America, the abused child who "fell through the cracks," ignored by child welfare, and the institutions meant to prevent these tragedies from occurring. In the last week the NY press has been in an uproar over this mess, crying out for convictions of the parents and for someone, anyone, to be held accountable for what happened. And there's that word again: accountability.

When I think of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy, his fight, his victories and defeats, I think of the word accountability over and over again. Of course this word gets easily overlooked when we think of Dr. King's struggle, especially since our schools, and media focus on the beginning and middle of his mission. It's like once the Civil Rights amendment was passed MLK passed into that great unknown with a satisfied smile on his face. But this was not the case, and Dr. King's mission was only half complete.

Once the CR amendment was passed Dr. King was working on economic equality for blacks and the poor--one that was based on that very word; accountability. It seems like nowadays it's in vogue to dismiss the idea of accountability--to say that accountability is something that is beyond human expectation. We talk about issues that face cultures in the world from the Middle East to the Native and Black Americans and we say "Well...What's past is past." We shrug and say "That was then and this is now, and we have to focus on solutions!" But this line of thinking is dangerous and illogical because one can neither learn or correct the mistakes of the past without knowing where those mistakes were borne from. Accountability, when tempered with mercy, is a trait that benefits society. It provides closure.

The thing that strikes me to the core is the sheer hypocrisy between what we learn as children and what we practice as adults. You learn that its a good trait to be able to apologize for what we do wrong, and even better to be able to forgive such mistakes and to pass out just sentences. In the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" one of the skills you are supposed to practice is to immediately and empathetically apologize for wrong doing. Yet the opposite of this--arrogance and egotism--is practiced every day by our leaders, and none as great as our President who seems incapable of self-criticism.

I say this to say that MLK's dream, of a world of equality and justice will never be realized until we all start standing up and taking accountability for our actions and our inactions. There can never be an ending without a beginning. We'll be mired in Iraq and more unless someone can say that it was a mistake being there in the first place. Well have more Nixzmary's on our hands unless someone can stand up and say that they ignored her silent pleas for help. And we'll have more poverty, more crime, more suffering unless we can all rise up and take some blame for the way things are today. And yes, to some extent we are guilty. When we pass a homeless man and we have an extra dollar in our pocket. When we disagree with our politicians and we don't vote. When we stay silent when we view a crime. When we don't care about our fellow man, we share a part, albeit a small part, in the suffering of the world. Admit it, stop it, and then we can go on with life.