"Without accountability and responsibility, freedom will quickly become a curse." -Me.
I believe that freedom is the great moral challenge of our day. Why? Because freedom is one of the rare things that gets 99.9% approval rating. People on the left love it: "Yea! Free love and drugs!" People on the right love it too. "Yea! Gun rights and property!" Everybody loves freedom, at least freedom as they see it; I have yet to meet somebody in my years that would speak of freedom as a bad thing, even if they think that others go overboard on their own interpretations of it.
But the older I get I'm starting to think that I'm in that 0.1%. I look around me and see that freedom must have some sense of control, which means that it automatically no longer is an absolute. One needs the accountability that comes with living in community, because individual freedom without concern for how it interacts with others will quickly lead to conflict. My pursuit of freedom might well mean that I care nothing for the rights and freedoms of others, and thus I need to be accountable to those who live around me.
Of course, this sense of communal responsibility has given way to the rights of the absolute individual. When you read the second amendment about gun rights, few see that the idea of forming a militia (something that involves people) comes up...it's simply that I want a bigger and meaner gun because that's what I want! When you hear talk about the 'right to privacy' which has become embedded in the national consciousness, be it internet security or abortion, it's about freedom from others telling me what to do or even being able to watch what I do.
So what's left when communal accountability is gone? Only the individual. And what happens when the individual has no sense of responsibility not only to his community but even himself? This is why so many people live such poor excuses for lives today. It's why people are so sloppy, because they don't demand more from themselves. It's why they there's so much finger pointing, because we see the specks in the eyes of others without seeing the planks in our own. People are no longer taught to take care of themselves; the left wants government to step in, while the right no longer has any sense of moral foundation; its sense of what is right for the individual (usually the white, rich, male individual) overwhelms everything else.
I believe that this is the reason that our western culture is on the brink of moral and spiritual collapse. Having forgotten about the sovereign God, having forgotten about our accountability towards others, and having forgotten even the sense of responsibility towards ourselves to be moral creatures, we have almost nothing on which to stand. I fear greatly for us.
