Accountable Citizens Power America

Welcome to our website dedicated to inspiring and developing accountable citizens. We're committed to providing quality information from experts in their fields and from personal experience. We'll also feature guest columns from time to time. Some of the authors you will recognize and others will be new.

Our focus is on encouraging responsible decision-making that will guide future generations to embrace a culture of accountability above personal gain.

We'll feature some writers and speakers who are experts in their respective fields. They may not be well known to all of our readers. You won't see them in Tik Tok videos. Some aren't alive anymore. But the knowledge of Og Mandino, John Maxwell, Stephen Covey, Mother Teresa, Zig Ziglar, Les Brown, Denis Waitley and others never goes out of date.

Whether teaching leadership skills or offering inspiring quotes, they have proven track records and our younger generation needs to have access to their wisdom.

Our Mission Statement

A mission statement should have two key components. It should be easy to remember and it should be a call to action. Our mission statement is below this paragraph. Those three lines also make up our key core values. Our thoughts and corresponding actions need to align with our core values.

What's New This Week?

Just below the video block which follows this section, we've added something new, something to get your day started with a bang. We're giving you a very short message to get things rolling in a positive direction. We'll use different sources for this inspiration.

This week we're expanding on our theme of grace to include truthfulness. Grace kind of encapsulates so many of the topics in our website, including truthfulness. Grace allows us to be confident in speaking truth, but even more important, being truthful in our daily lives. Speaking truth and being truthful aren't the same. It's easy to say things, but the real measuring stick is our actions, how we live each day, and how we treat the people around us.

Sometimes our current culture moves the goalposts of truthfulness to make things easier and to lessen personal accountability. Lowering the standards of accountability only weakens the overall fabric of our nation and distorts the national moral compass.

Being truthful in the way we lead our lives and guiding our fellow citizens along the same path maintains the standards that built our nation. Grace allows us to see people where they are without judgment. Grace gives us the personal touch to help lift up when a lift is needed and share the truth of the American dream.

Leadership Spotlight

Every week or so, we'll present a short video from someone on that previous list along with some others. Internet research suggests that on average, most people only spend about four minutes watching a video. 

This week we hear from Fr. Mike Schmitz. He tends to get to the heart of matters in a way that is relatable without being "churchy." In this nine minute video, Fr. Mike talks about being truthful. As is often the case in his talks, he points out his own missteps and failures as examples of how we strive to improve as responsible adults.

He even leaves in some bloopers during production, at times. We're all human.

Apologies for the commercials that might interrupt part of this video. It's a You Tube thing, I guess? 

Start Your Day Off With A Bang

The Habit Poem

Something Else To Think About

“It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries--we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?
...
Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Two Simple, Empowering Words!

At first it might not seem like it. At first it might seem as though there is a scattered approach to an objective or maybe even a lot of content without any objective. But as you dig deeper into our website, we hope you see a pattern, a clear objective and an organized structure to our pages. Because they all center on our core values. A little farther down this home page, you can see those three guiding principles.

To best serve our readers, we're giving you two words that will impact every page, every subject, every observation. Two words that will help you set and achieve goals. Two words that will get you past procrastination and self-doubt.

Two words that will help you maintain balance. These two words will work as you plan your next steps, as you listen to your spouse talk about the good and bad of their day, as you show up for your kid's events and as you enjoy your own precious, calming moments of quiet.

You can find all of our posts under the page directory in the right margin of every page. Two anchor links also list pages specifically related to their outline. Those links are just below.

Being Accountable for Your Actions

Leadership and Self-Development

And those two words, you might ask? We put them below this sentence in colorful format so they are "noticeable."

Being Accountable Your Actions

All of our pages that focus on "why" being accountable is important are listed in this specific directory. You'll find some examples from history that inspire and some that warn of the consequences of failure to act in the manner of a responsible citizen. 

We've also placed the guest columns from T.O. Illustratio under this navigation button, located in the right margin of every page.  

Leadership and Self Development

We've added a new tier two page that includes all the posts related to the "how" of being an accountable citizen. We've set these pages up in specific paragraphs with headings to allow our readers to find all related subject matter in a more organized manner. You'll find series posts linked as well for easy flow. The title of this new page is Leadership and Self Development. It can be found in the navigation bar in the right margin of every page. 

Life Lessons. We Have The Experience Scars!

Our own editorial team will add some first person stories that we hope will inspire you and offer insight on how you can create positive change. We spent time thinking through the core values that would guide the content selection before we launched this website.  

Some of the content you read on these pages might be controversial. You might not agree with every paragraph or every statement. Part of being an accountable citizen is seeking a middle ground on as many issues as possible to find a place where we can work together to lift our nation to benefit every citizen.

We'll present some pages that sound much different than what you might have heard or read about some of these controversial subjects. We aren't asking you to blindly accept the words you read on this website. We will provide sound logic and factual content. It will be up to our readers to decide for themselves how they feel about what they read.

Accountable Citizens Learn The Lessons of History

Learning from history is vital. Repeating past mistakes only leads to future problems. While this is a non-political website, the state of politics in America must be addressed. It is having a negative effect on the development of accountable citizens. We can't grow as a nation if we abdicate our responsibility in this essential area.

It's essential that we include the younger generation in this discussion. This quagmire that is the current two-party system has dissolved into such a place that it has become a national embarrassment. It has become obvious that solving problems in our country is not a high priority among the vast majority of elected officials.  

Our nation began as a great experiment. There have been challenges and grievous errors along the way. Whenever humans are involved, both of those things occur. The key is how we correct those errors. In all things, beginning with truth is the first step. And too often, the most difficult. But establishing accountability as a core value requires us to always rely on being truthful.

As we follow that path of truth, it will become clear that a certain handout mentality has promoted the idea that accountability feels like an attack. This idea has been championed by an elite class that believes personal responsibility is a thing of the past and that holding ourselves accountable for our actions is an obsolete waste of effort.

"Accountability doesn't work unless there's a context of personal caring."  Jonathon Raymond

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