I have become increasingly concerned with the idea of "unconditional citizenship" in our country. Robert A. Heinlein called this situation "a warm-blood democracy" where the rights and responsibilities of citizenship are bestowed in full by birth or by some other "automatic" benchmark. In the United States we are born with protective rights, and are franchised with full citizenship by age 21. I am of the opinion that citizenship is too easy to earn in our country. Many of the people of this nation are proud to cry and scream for their rights, but they don't seem to understand the responsibilities that go along with those rights.
John Locke, an 18th century philosopher helped to develop the idea of the social contract, which is the basis of our constitution. The social contract theory holds that people would be willing to give up certain rights for the guaranteed protection of others. A social contract was not an agreement between a king and his subjects like the Magna Carta, but an agreement between free men, equals who banded together to form a society of equals. The franchise of citizenship is that we agree to work together, to abide by generally agreed upon laws, and work for the common good of the nation rather than for ourselves. The agreement works both ways, however, and provides great latitudes as far as personal rights. As individuals, we have agreed upon freedoms that are inviolate, nobody can breech or take them away without just cause. The social contract theory has one major flaw in it: it presupposes that the people for which the agreement is written know and understand not only their rights but also their responsibilities as citizens.
In the United States, the social contract theory held firm for the first half of the 20th Century. People understood and were willing to undertake the responsibilities of citizenship through action. The vast majority of male citizens responded and served their country in times of danger, people voted, people did "the right thing" when it was required of them. Most citizens trusted their elected officials to represent them honestly, whether this was genuinely the case or not.
All this changed after the rather subdued and conformities of the 1950's. In the 1960's, people began to rebel against the roles they were forced into by the 50's, especially dark skinned people and women. As a nation, the younger people began to break out of the molds cast for them by the older authoritarian folk. This situation was both a great awakening and a dangerous sign of decay for our country. We certainly needed to extend the rights guaranteed by our social contract to women, blacks, and everyone else in this country, but we also began to distrust and alienate ourselves from our responsibilities as citizens. I believe we began to see our responsibilities as citizens as part of the "old authoritarian" skins we were desperately trying to shed, so we shucked them along with the things we didn't agree with about our government. When we did this, we set not only ourselves, but also our children up for a serious fall.
You see, our freedoms according to the social contract are only as good as our vigilance and our willingness to participate in our government. The more we pull away and refuse to be a part of it, the more we allow others to make important decisions for us. In essence, the more we give up our responsibilities of citizenship, the more we endanger our rights as citizens. The mistrust of government only continues to get worse because we don't want to be a part of it, thus our government gets away with more and more and we care less and less. It would be fair to say that our elected officials are happy we don't want anything to do with them, they have a freer hand to do whatever they want.
What are our responsibilities as citizens? We are expected to vote, act as jurors in court cases when asked, serve our armed forces when it becomes necessary to defend our nation, act responsibly in situations where we interact with others, and treat each other the way we want to be treated with hatred or malice for no one. Instead of this, many of us do not vote, we try to find ways out of being jurors, we either dodge the draft or complain when we are called up to serve our nation, and we treat people with contempt, malice, and prejudice. Beyond this, many of our citizens are rude, crude, and don't have the common decency to treat themselves or anyone else with respect. It is this conduct that will destroy our social contract.
How do we change this? We must get to our people while they are still young. We must compel service to nation as part of the requirements for full citizenship. Whether through service in the armed forces, or through some form of "community service" our youth must learn what it means to be a citizen of this nation through hard work, as well as through civics courses. We must give them a sense of pride in belonging to this nation, a sense of responsibility to serving it faithfully. If we do not impress upon our young people the importance of responsible citizenship, we are letting them believe that they have all rights and no responsibility, we cannot afford this state of affairs. Our nation will destroy itself in its apathy and irresponsible behavior if we do not reverse this awful trend.
There is no such thing, nor should there be, as unconditional citizenship. Just because people are born into this nation does not mean they are fit to be franchised as full citizens. Citizenship must be earned through hard work and a willingness to take on responsibility. An understanding of both the rights and responsibilities of citizenship cannot be "bestowed" to someone just because they are born within the borders, they must be taught through deeds and words. Anything short of this is one sided and incorrect.