Equal Rights For All; Responsibilities For All
It’s hard to hide in small towns. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing, good and bad. They know who is contributing and who stands by idle.
Pat in Superior: People who are hard-working and contributing to their community, passionate to their neighbors, we don’t care color, race, religion. Their behavior garners respect from others.
The sentiment encompasses the enormous tension I found between compassion for others and the expectations we have of them, between the equality promised us by the Declaration of Independence and the unwritten responsibilities we have as citizens. The latter might not be mentioned in the founding documents, but they exist in people’s minds. Deep down there’s a belief that with rights come responsibilities.
Based on four very different locales
“Equal Rights For All; Responsibilities For All” is the sixth of “10 principles to unite America” that look both to the past and to the future, reminding us of what we hold dear as Americans and at the same time challenging us to do better. They stand out as common purpose for our nation.
Radha in Concord: What does it mean to be a citizen? Not just a person, but a citizen of this nation. What are my responsibilities? I’m getting the benefits of all that this country has to offer. What are my responsibilities?
Therein lies an inequity of enormous proportion that gnaws at various of the participants in one fashion or another. As they see it, there are those who fulfill their responsibilities without fully enjoying their rights. Meanwhile, there are others who lap up the benefits without living up to their responsibilities.
The victims of this inequity have conscientiously borne their responsibilities as citizens – they earn a living, they support their families, they give back to their communities.
Jackie in Edgefield: My dad worked 44 years. He contributed everything he had. He was the president and vice president of the NAACP, he worked hard in the community.
Paul, who worked his way up to become the first Hispanic to manage the bank in Ajo: The Mexican people, the native American people who have succeeded have done so because they applied themselves. Nothing was given to them.
The shame is that so many did not fully enjoy the equality that is supposed to be theirs. What comes up over and over in these discussions is discrimination based on race or ethnicity. To be a fully contributing member of society and still be subjected to the racial slurs of days gone by and blatantly out in the open again today is front of mind for the participants who endure it. They raised the subject spontaneously in response to any number of questions.
On the other side of the coin, the beneficiaries of the inequity outlined above are those individuals – of every color – who grab up everything they figure they are entitled to as citizens but without necessarily living up to their responsibilities.
Quite unlike equal rights for all, the panel of participants make clear that the expectation is not equal responsibilities for all. Each and every one strongly believes society needs to act with compassion for those who are disabled, frail, ill, even those who are temporarily caught in tough straits. At the same time, however, most of the participants are quite vocal about holding everyone else to a tougher standard.
Josie in Ajo: We all need to put in what we can, and not expect things be given to us just because.
Lorraine in Ajo: As a kid growing up, I learned the hard way that I couldn’t be lazy. If I was lazy, I had to do it over and over and over again until I learned.
They and others are troubled by the contrast between townspeople who are doing all they can to provide for themselves and their families and where possible to help their community, versus neighbors they perceive to be able-bodied who are simply living off governmental assistance.
How much of the latter actually occurs is a matter of dispute among the participants. And fixing it isn’t easy. Mike, an economist in Concord, argues that for generation after generation of welfare recipients, it’s the only way of life they know. And it won’t change until they are shown something different.
To a person the participants feel, however, that as citizens we are obliged to the limits of our capabilities to work, do our fair share, and – for those who can – to give back to society. With equal rights for all, come responsibilities for all.
Jack turns to a fellow Concordian, the estimable Ralph Waldo Emerson, to make the point: “To leave the world a bit better, that is to have succeeded.” Emerson did not set the bar unreasonably high. One didn’t need to rectify a social injustice to qualify. For him, a healthy child or a well-tended garden patch met the standard.
Doing so still lingers today as an expectation.
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