Earning Ones Rights

9 Pages 2177 Words

The Concept of Earning One’s Citizenship

Citizenship is defined as a being a citizen or a person owing allegiance to and entitled to the protection of a sovereign state. Citizen preferred for one owing allegiance to a state in which sovereign power is retained by the people and sharing in the political rights of those people. The concept of which in one of its earliest was given to us by the Romans, who had just began to understand the importance of a populace contributing to the decisions of its own fate. Modern American citizenship as we know it today was defined for us in the constitution of this nation by the founding fathers. Citizenship as they had envisioned it even back then was not free, but came with a price. A citizen was expected to carry out certain civic duties and responsibilities such as the defense of the republic, participating in state and local government, and voting on affairs of the nation as a whole. Benjamin Franklin once said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” Given all the communication technology; receiving and sending information has never been easier, however civic involvement is at one if its lowest points in the past 100 years. Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote of her husband, that Theodore Roosevelt taught by precept and example that men owed something at all times, whether in peace or in war, for the privilege of citizenship and that the burden rest equally on rich and poor. He said that, no matter what conditions existed, the blame lay no more heavily on the politician and his machine controlling city, state, or nation, than on the shoulders of the average citizen who concerned himself so little with his government that he allowed men to stay in power in spite of his dissatisfaction because he was too indifferent to exert himself to get better men in office. In order to maintain such a jewel of democracy, a new s...