On the Nature of Citizenship viewed through the Putnam and Oldenquist Model
Kirpatrick Signature Series
Application Assignment 1.3
Authored and Read by Mayasonette Lambkiss
LA400_LA410_LA420-C321 AMERICAN VISION AND VALUES (2243_1)
Date: 11/30/2023
Due Date: 12/3/23
Engaged citizenship begins with self-education. Understanding the basic concepts of what it means to be a citizen, what problems move in our local, domestic, foreign and global communities is the beginning of taking interest in our fellow humans. It is an important topic, because we all depend on each other for survival, supply, safety, personal growth, and interconnectedness.
The most important realization we may come to in our relationship to our community is that the more we ensure other peoples' needs to be met, rights respected, and gifts to shine to others, the more our needs, rights, and shining gifts will receive the kind attitudes. Only in a very small part for exchange and bargain, but because the more we educate our surroundings for a generous and right interconnectedness, the healthier our societies become.
To be engaged citizens simply means to make ourselves available for a necessary purpose to others within the context of our society. The nation we live in, the United States brings us the specifics on how they expect their citizens to contribute to the country as a whole, it offers us civic rights in exchange for duties and responsibilities. The more correctly we use our responsibilities, the more we ensure everyone else's rights, and our own role within the matrix. The healthier our engagement with our society, the healthier it is for others, and the coming generations.
Putnam's theory focuses on the importance of being involved, and it remains the most significant starting point. Without involvement there is nothing. Nothing happens, only rogue societal wildlife will be spreading, and the shadow of human nature carries inherent issues for our survival individually and as a human family as well.
Oldenquist beautifully makes the case for the importance of education, which will take place either we deliberately cultivate an educational direction and standard for our youngsters, or not. But the risk of losing the best qualities of our civilization is significantly less if we take responsibility and intentionally direct the formation of culture through education, than if we ignore our power to build better minds for a better society.
Americans created a new culture where individualism and respect to innate qualities of human beings is worshipped from birth, and it has brought a new sense of freedom to the world as such. While scientific observation of the various cultures brings to light, that apart from the benefits of individualism and freedom it has weaknesses, that other countries can manage better, and we have a reason to look into the relevance of how to shape our own attitudes towards the education of the will of children in their formative years already.
While American citizens perhaps are the most engaged citizens of any society, it is greatly engraved in our history of innovation, taking initiatives and grassroot-movements, it is imperative for the future of our country that we do not neglect the importance of shaping and defining the range and quality of freedom we groom our children to cultivate in their own minds towards our country and the world. America was built on the grassroot initiatives of leading minds, and it is an arena still providing the greatest opportunities for exercising civic freedom.
Grassroot activities form into movements by networking, and networking is dependent on the unmeasurable and immeasurable extent of social capital that many tried to define with different understandings at hand. Robert Putman wrote in his work of Bowling Alone (2000) “Financial capital - the wherewithal for mass marketing - has steadily replaced social capital - that is, grassroots citizen networks - as the coin of the realm.” He reflects here on the sad phenomenon of how mass marketing is replacing the word-of-mouth promotion of real ideas and quality advertising.
While Bourdieu defines social capital as a person's property, Putnam recognizes it as the positive product of human interaction, a value network of a vast number of individuals, and therefore cannot limit it as one person's property, but a shared property of an entire society. The replacement of social networking with mass media robs our culture from the capital created by positive human interaction.
The sense of freedom American citizens enjoy, including the freedom to engage and make a difference, is intoxicating to members of other societies, where they do not enjoy the same level of freedom themselves. By migrating to the US, and assimilating into its culture, they also bring with them influences that can invite and cater to unacceptable, even criminal activities from Americans, using citizenship as a bait and a control over the freedom-hungry newcomers.
Though Elenor Roosevelt recognized the need for a united front on a global scale to address the issues of crimes against humanity and proposed already in 1948 to summit called the United Nations a declaration for Universal Human Rights, it is still the gravest issue to deal with today. To respect a human being simply means to acknowledge their power to lead their own life, and not use power to disempower them. Yes, respect is the end of power struggle, and power struggle is the end of freedom, and the end of freedom is the beginning of enslavement. Many does not know their right to use their own personal influence to instigate positive change, and others step into the vacant role to do it for them. And yet again others are groomed by more savvy and skilled persons to give up their personal power only so they would voluntarily submit to them.
In both cases we end up with involuntary and even voluntary enslavement of another individual, who by nature should be given the same right to a free will as anybody else. This activity, especially if the realm of crime is introduced to the process, is called human trafficking or trafficking in persons today in legal terms. The United States Constitution 13th Amendment abolished slavery, and Elenor Roosevelt adopted the intent accordingly into the Universal Human Rights 4th Article to protect against slavery.
What is about American freedom that millions of people value so deeply, they would allow themselves to be trapped in slavery for, which is the ultimate denial of freedom? (Need to state here, that not all human slavery is accessed by surrendering to whatever it takes to becoming an American citizen, but the most commonly used tool, and a voluntary one at that used in the enslavement of individuals.) In other countries the idea of the significance of an individual voice in the whole of a community is an unimaginable, often undervalued, undermined, even chastised quality of being present. Many Americans don't know that, because they never experienced to be constitutionally stripped of their individual significance, and they so underestimate this freedom they never use it. They are citizens, they know their responsibilities, they know their rights, use it, correctly and criminally too, but since for them it is a given, they have no innate sense of its value. An unengaged citizen is a half-baked citizen. But an immigrant, who is willing to surrender his or her basic human rights temporarily in the hopeful promise of a much greater freedom in the future, maybe understands the value of the American freedom and fully engaged to acquire it, even willing to pay an insane price for it, but also deceived: the intent to enslave is never temporary.
My dream to American citizenship started in my 8 years old head, and I stepped out of my comfort zone leaving my country of Hungary at 20 years old with the hope to realize this dream. Took me 28 years to be sworn in as an American citizen, after an incredibly questionable journey (story to be told another time) but was never an unengaged preparation for citizenship. One year later my actions lead me to becoming a United States diplomat, not just a citizen, and it is my engagement with the problems in my community and worldwide that gave me the means and the honor to do so. I worked so hard, and endured so much to arrive to my citizenship, that I am absolutely refusing to remain a half-baked citizen, lay back, earn a nice mortgage and car, and enjoy the freedom that everyone deserves, but very few is willing to promote correctly, and some would even exploit for financial gain preying on others' desire to be free. Today I am a diplomat, because I am an engaged citizen, and I am willing to die for it if I had to and live for it in every day of my life to make it better for everyone... even those who think only crime can sustain them financially and pay the bills, for they need education too to change their ways. For as Putnam had put it in his work titled Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American Community, “Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen.” I must agree here with the emerging idea, that the diminishing of quality human relationships in the grassroot level of networking also means the emergence of slavery, and slavery is the end of any self-respecting society.
Oldenquist puts great emphasis on the moral education of the individual from a very young age and highlights the power of public injustice against the individual such as racism among others as a dart in the heart of participatory citizenship, for how can you expect a victim of such debilitating perception to be a good citizen. The article of Oldenquist on citizenship explains: "This collection of mistakes and confusion can combine to make a person reject the idea of citizenship education and retain just the name. 'Citizenship education' then becomes critical thinking, political activism, or 'inquiry', these all being way to avoid dealing with the ethical basis of citizenship and concern oneself with only the skills of citizenship without the ethical basis". Later he details what he means by ethical and moral basis for citizenship.
I fully support Putnam's theory of a better society begins with getting involved, and Oldenquist's theory that we need moral education, morality is not innate, and this precious, uniquely human attribute can be lost if left uncultivated. Therefore, I made this kind of moral education for Universal Human Rights my business, literally, and my engaged citizen project for life. I hope you sign up to follow the Institute for Universal Human Rights Hawaii Radio on demand by adding yourself as a subscriber below.
Aloha, and may the Spirit of Righteousness help you forgive.
And you just heard, Mayasonette Lambkiss from Honolulu January 2024.
