An Extended Tweet

I sent out a “Tweet” yesterday, “If we lack the political will to demand accountability we will cease to be a people governed equally under the rule of law.”

The “art” of tweeting escapes me. I’ve never become comfortable writing Tweets. It either comes out sounding more than mundane or like I’m straining to achieve immortality. Besides … concision has never been my strong suit and 140 characters drives me bats.

AP reports more than 1 million American households will lose their homes this year. Nearly 528,000 homes were foreclosed in the first six months of 2010. In June, one in every 411 households received a foreclosure filing. There’s a foreclosure filing every 7.5 seconds.

Economic pain reprioritizes everyone’s “To Do” list. Prosecuting Bush and Dick “Pulse-less” Cheney for illegal wars or frog marching the money-mad Wall Street pirates into waiting police vans just isn’t going to happen when more and more of us have to spend our day figuring out how we’re going to survive. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has kicked in … and Bush and Obama have kicked us down a couple of notches.

We need the security of a place to live, a job, and good health in order to keep our families intact. It’s difficult (impossible) to get anyone to jump on the prosecution bandwagon when survival is threatened.

Our standard of living drifts and dips lower and lower. Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages. In real dollars, adjusted for inflation, people are actually making less than they made thirty years ago.

Just because we don’t demand accountability of our institutions doesn’t mean the institutions stop demanding accountability from us. It was barely a two way street before but soon … I think we’re going to see a lot of one way traffic coming right at us.

An Extended Tweet July 17, 2010