America’s New Year resolution

One of the oldest customs in America is the New Year resolution – those promises we make to ourselves to do better. With this in mind, we should consider a list of our civic responsibilities.

We Americans are always invoking our Constitutional rights – individual prerogatives unknown to most other people on Earth. A few years ago, a group of prominent scholars, commissioned by the Freedoms Foundation of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, drafted a “Bill of Responsibilities addressing our obligations as citizens. “Freedom and responsibility,” declared the preamble, “are mutual and inseparable; we can ensure the enjoyment of the one only by exercising the other.”

The Bill’s ten articles call on Americans voluntarily to observe these rules:

1. Be responsible fully for your own actions and for the consequences of them. Freedom to choose carries with it the responsibility for our choices.

2. Respect the rights and beliefs of others. In a free society, diversity flourishes. Courtesy and consideration toward others are measures of a civilized society.

3. Give sympathy, understanding and help to others.

4. Do our best to meet our own and our families’ needs. There is no personal freedom without economic freedom. By helping ourselves and those closest to us to become productive members of society, we contribute to the strength of the nation.

5. Respect and obey the laws… Liberty itself is built on a foundation of law. That foundation provides an orderly process for changing laws. It also depends on our obeying laws once they have been freely adopted.

6. Respect the property of others, both private and public. No one has a right to what is not his or hers. The right to enjoy what is ours depends on our respecting the right of others to enjoy what is rightfully theirs.

7. Share with others our appreciation of the benefits and obligations of freedom. Freedom shared is freedom strengthened.

8. Participate constructively in the nation’s political life. Democracy depends on an active citizenry. It depends equally on an informed citizenry.

9. Help freedom survive by assuming personal responsibility for its defense. Our nation cannot survive unless we defend it. Its security rests on the individual determination of each of us to help preserve it.

10. Respect the rights and meet the responsibilities on which our liberty and our democracy depend.

Unlike the Bill of Rights, the Bill of Responsibilities carries no legally enforceable weight. Cynics may dismiss it as mere patriotic window dressing. In defining the essential duties of citizenship, the Freedoms Foundation’s bill conveys a moral suasion, which is undeniable. It also is an idea whose time is overdue.

In the coming year, as in years past, Americans will be struggling to overcome problems which plague the nation – crime, drugs, corruption and the undermining of traditional family values, to name a few. For the most part, efforts are underway to resolve our manifold difficulties.

A wise old statesman, Winston Churchill, perhaps made the most astute observation about Americans. “In the end,” he said, “Americans will always do the right thing – after exhausting all other alternatives.”

(Reprinted from Comet, Dec. 28, 1994)