Citizenship - Our One True Love

Maybe citizenship wasn’t meant to be this easy. That cradle of democracy – early Greece – wouldn’t know what to make of citizenship today. To be sure, it was a citizenship of elitism, but the price for belonging to such a unique group was steep. You were automatically expected to fight in wars. It was your responsibility to debate other citizens in public assemblies, to elect one another as magistrates, and to assist in the decisions involving the delivery of services.Historical research has revealed that such citizens were intimately and directly involved in politics, justice, military service, ceremonies, debate and knowledgeable discussions, athletics and even artistic pursuits. To shirk your responsibilities was reprehensible because the emphasis was rarely on rights but duties, and someone who refused to fulfill such tasks was deemed as socially disruptive. Above all, your individuality was enshrined and protected by law, but you lived it out in terms of service to the larger community and even the nation.Then there are the rigors of citizenship in the West today.  Well, not so much. When NBC aired a 2007 Public Service Announcement declaring, “Everyone is born with their one true love – themselves,” it revealed as much about citizenship as it did about individualism.During one of the most tenuous moments in American history a few years earlier, President George W. Bush sought to rally his citizens following the attacks of 9/11. There was no challenge to “ask not” what your country can do for you, in the intrepid words of John Kennedy. He didn’t urge people to sacrifice for the effort of defeating terrorism, or for communities to pull together to face what was clearly a defining moment in their history. Surveying his vast citizenry, Bush asked them to do what they were clearly good at: shopping. It was understandable, given that he didn’t want the economy to slump, but it was hardly the kind of defining challenge citizens of the past would have expected.  It prompted Ronald Spiers, of the New York Times, and a former diplomat, to pronounce that the President’s challenge, “did nothing to mobilize public opinion to accept the sacrifices that war implies.”Canada now has some of the highest private debt in the world. We have complained that we are being taxed far too high and yet we have let our credit cards do the talking for us. Young Canadians have become big spenders long before they have achieved modest earnings. We wonder why various levels of government don’t do something about poverty, climate change or healthcare, and yet we inform those same governments to get by without any help from us.These summer blog posts will be built on a simple premise, but one likely to be unpopular. We have pushed the envelope of exploitation, materialism, and entitlement about as far as we can go. We are now realizing that it has resulted in failure, not only at the highest government levels, but also within our own individual lives as citizens. Our fixation on the here and now has led us into an era where the larger long-term challenges remain unaddressed – we are rapidly losing the capacity for thinking ahead. There are enlightening examples to the opposite, but they clearly have not reached the stage where they can shape citizens and their governments to think of the longer-term implications of their daily consumption.About 10 years ago I encountered a shopper in a grocery store who said I had been of assistance to him a number of years previous when he was out of work. He had since become employed by the very store we were in. “I dabble in the lottery,” he stated, “and if I ever come up big, I’ll donate half of it to the food bank.” His confident tone was somewhat encouraging. Three months later he hit the jackpot, somewhere in the mid-$300,000 range. I never talked to him again but on the couple of occasions where he has spotted me, he quickly veered down another aisle. Somewhere in his journey he lost his commitment to that promise ... and to the broader community. We have been collectively doing the same for years. All those polls we respond to, claiming that climate change or inequality concern us, are just that – polls. The answer to those issues is ultimately in our own commitment to their solution.Unlocking human capital has proved only partially successful in our modern economy. It will take something more, something integral and ethical, to carry us to the next stage of sustainable actions. The fight for the common good that exemplified the 1960s has morphed into the self-absorption of 2011. Citizens get the government they deserve, and if we’re failing in our biggest challenges, leering in Ottawa’s direction is just another sign of our failure to take citizenship to the next level.