Citizenship Malpractice
March 24, 2008 | 3 Comments
I hereby charge my friends, neighbors and fellow countrymen and women with citizenship malpractice. Oh yeah, and I’m charging myself, too. Because we’re all being pathetic. War, injustice, corporate crimes, eco-genocide and economic thievery surround us with the regularity of the air we breathe. And yet we continue to yawn.
“Oh please, can’t someone else deal with this?” we seemingly opine in our silent slumber. “Can’t we blame the other guy? The other party? The other nation or state? The other neighbor? Your spouse? Anyone, goddamn it. Just not me!”
But the stink of it all remains at our feet. Dick Cheney spews his venom toward our majority with a big, fatuous “so?” and we squeak like little mice in the corner. We run to our blogs and our friends and our neighbors and we say all the same thing: “Did you hear what Cheney said?”
Repeat it a million times: Dick Cheney said “so?” to a question about why the Iraq war continues despite the fact that 75% of the nation wants it stopped now. Let’s see who can repeat it the best. Let’s see who can express the most authentic-sounding shock and awe. Let’s all read it at every blog and listen to every pundit explain it over and over and over again.
Got it, people? Dick Cheney said “so?” to you and your opinions. And all we can muster in response is a cacophony of whines that merely report on his latest utterance of arrogance. “Hey, no fair! The Vice President doesn’t care!”
And why should he? What’s he got to be scared of? The little blogging mice? The platitude-filled pundits who keep steering us all toward the 18 millionth contortion on the “Hillary and Obama scenarios”? Or the people – we, the citizens – who just keep yawning in the face of each and every new slap to our faces?
At least Dick Cheney’s being honest. Moreover, he’s almost daring the citizens of this nation to wake up and challenge him — and them. Cheney’s saying “so?” to the cameras to look polite. Off camera, it’s more like: Stop me if you can.
And, so far, we can’t. Because we’re not taking our own citizenship seriously. We’re abdicating an enormous amount of our power to the “powers that be.” Worse, instead of effective activist responses, we satisfy ourselves with ineffective repetitions of the crimes being committed against us. Talking about the injustices and outright crimes being perpetuated by our political leaders has replaced DOING something about it.
Imagine, if you will, if you went to a doctor and she said: “Yep, it’s cancer.” And then she left the room. Better yet, she got on the public address system in the office and announced: “This patient has cancer.” And everyone on staff and everyone in the waiting room just nodded about the horrors of it, called some folks they knew to repeat the horrors, emailed their list-serve about it, and then just carried on with their day and their lives.
We’d call that medical malpractice. Because in medicine, we don’t just expect a diagnosis, we also expect one hell of a good faith effort at treatment or, if you will, an activist remedy.
Oh, if modern-day citizenship only carried the same kind of expectations. You know, a simple kind of expectation that would follow the medical lineage between diagnosis and cure. And if we, the citizens, simply acknowledged the problems without effectively addressing them, we’d be accused of citizenship malpractice – a most serious dereliction of duty that has betrayed our ideals, our future, our health, our safety and the very foundation of our democracy that requires citizen leadership.
Consider ourselves charged – on several counts – of citizenship malpractice.
And our sentence? Stop the war and stop the injustice. Now – not after the next primary, the next vote, the next candidate, the next rally, the next month, the next promise, but now.
Get to work, America. And clear your record.
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