Citizen Self-Reliance

(This post is part of the 30-day Self-Reliance writing project organized through Seth Godin's Domino publishing project.)

Americans live under a constitutional republic which provides a great number of rights and responsibilities to its citizens. Everyone is hot for their rights, but for a number of decades now too many of us have neglected our responsibilities.

We have enjoyed (in fact, insisted upon) the right to make a good living, have a nice house, live in a good community, get a good education, all to the end of living 'the good life.'

The enjoyment of all these rights have distracted us from the imperative of holding up the responsibilities end of the bargain that won us those rights.

We have allowed ourselves to become distracted by the lives we lead at the expense of letting our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our country be left in the hands and to the interests of others.

The result is a once great country that refuses to invest in itself, educate its young, take care of its infrastructure, care for each other. We have so focused on ourselves that we have become terrible stewards of the very thing that enabled us to become so self-absorbed — the country that gave us those rights.

'We've got ours' has replaced 'out of many, one' as our national motto. The very idea of sacrifice is alien to us, despite the fact that we celebrate the sacrifice of those who came before us so that we might have the opportunity to celebrate.

When we abandon the civic space, as we have so clearly done for the past four or more decades, we leave our country to others. That space has eroded and corroded. It is no longer vibrant. It has the tawdry feel of a seedy downtown in a fading city.

What can bring it back? Only our active involvement and engagement. Our active commitment to make it better. To pull the weeds. To sweep the walks. To wipe away the cobwebs. To pick up the trash.

We must turn now away from those personal pursuits and face out into the commons to reassert our presence there. In doing that we will renew that place and we will renew ourselves. We will recognize each other. We will get to know each other again — and we will get to like each other again.

Stereotypes flourish in ignorance. We have been turned inward for too long. What we know, we know by second- and third-hand accounts. We can change that. We can break the binds that hold us back, that undermine our efforts, that paralyze our communities.

We do that by engaging. By getting out to a meeting. By taking up a cause. By joining a group. By staking our claim on our neighborhood, our city, our state and our country. That is how we renew. That is how we return to greatness.