Bishop Desmond Tutu led his country into an era he called Truth and Reconciliation. South Africa had been as bad as the American South; worse, the Blacks had created a revolutionary armed force committing terrorist acts, something Southern Blacks never did. (In my town, a molotov cocktail thrown into a garbage can triggered a curfew on the whole of South Phoenix, where we lived, the Black part of town)
Francis Fukuyama declares accountability to be one of the tripods holding up a democratic society. What Tutu called Truth we can call Accountability. It is not enough to usher the governors who delayed a lock down or the agency heads who fired responsible professionals or the cabinet members who pursued witch hunts for whistle blowers off the political stage; we must hold them accountable to a far greater degree than that.
Some of you might worry about revenge overtaking our motives. No, it is accountability. And you might consider that accountability could be hanging by the neck until dead, so jail time or being stripped of citizenship or exiled may seem draconian but I maintain that simply losing the vote is not enough. They will just plot a come-back.
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
