Responsibilities of a Citizen

This morning the radio show I listen to on my drive to work was doing an informal poll of people, asking who they are going to vote for in the upcoming election. You can imagine the types of people who crawled out of the woodwork to call in and expound upon their particular political ideology. However, I was filled with a mixture of amazement and disgust with one particular caller. A young man called in, saying that his fiancée is voting for Barack Obama, and although he didn’t understand why she was planning to vote this way, he wished he could do something about it. When the radio DJ asked who he was planning to vote for, he replied “Oh, I’m not registered to vote because I don’t want to be called in for jury duty”.

!

There are three directions I can go with how angry this statement made me.

Our Criminal Justice System has failed:
This kid just pointed out one of the huge flaws in our criminal justice system – in that a jury of your peers is no longer really possible. What you end up with is a jury consisting of mostly people who were not smart enough to get out of jury duty. Sure, there will be a small minority of people who consider it a civic duty to sacrifice part of their precious time to go decide whether or not a fellow citizen is guilty of the crime he or she is accused of committing by the State. Those people are most often rejected by one side or the other during jury selections. This leaves the people who truly do not want to be there, but could not come up with any way to get out of it. Our founding fathers once thought that good people could be counted on to carry out what they considered civic duties, but that was one of the many times they over estimated future generations.

People who do not vote have no moral standing to complain about our leadership:
Yes, people are granted the right to say pretty much whatever they want due to freedoms granted all citizens. However, if you complain about the state of things, but refuse to take any action - no matter how small - to fix the problem, you are a spineless windbag spouting so much hot air. Sure, it may not matter in this election that you vote one way or another in a state where you already know that the electoral votes are cast for the Republican candidate, but to bring about any sort of change requires good people to act upon their consciences and vote. Otherwise, how do you sleep at night?

Is it any wonder we have the divorce rates we do?:
This kid said that he didn’t understand why his fiancée wanted to vote for Barack Obama. While I can think of reasons to vote for AND against BOTH major party candidates, the problem here is that he doesn’t understand why the woman he plans to MARRY is voting for a particular candidate. He must really know her well. I’m not saying he has to agree with her reasons, but at the very least he should try to understand them. Hell, even be able to list a few if he can’t understand them.
My wife and I haven’t always agreed on political issues, but at the very least, at the times we disagreed, we understood each other’s positions.

Maybe I am just wearing rose-colored glasses as I look at the past, but it seems that each of the above issues were not a problem back when people actually took civic duties seriously. We as a nation have rallied together many times over the last couple hundred years of our national existence. How many problems we currently face would be dramatically changed if good people everywhere started to participate more in their own governments and lives, if people put the same amount of care into their spouse, family, and civic duties that they put into their jobs and hobbies?

Citizenship in this great country is both a right and a responsibility. It's high time some people learn this simple fact.