My niece sent me a petition to sign. It got me thinking: how many petitions do I sign every month? How many letters do I write to different authorities? Emails, phone calls, … very many and yet not nearly enough.
It is amazing how much work an ordinary citizen had to do. An ordinary citizen in this day and age I mean. And it got me thinking about when it all started. That is, we, ordinary people, when did we start assuming so much responsibility? I guess since we broke free from kings, lords, feudals, … and decided to have a say in our own lives. To work, to own, to think, to choose, and to vote. Did we know how much we were taking on? We broke free, got educated, and continued in our path to freedom and autonomy. And we know that we cannot get there without assuming quite a lot of responsibility.
To choose to think and make decisions, to choose to care about human beings, near and far, is no mean feat. We allow ourselves to experience the joy and the burden of being an ordinary citizen in 21st century. We work very hard, we play very little, we don’t own much, we have a lot to lose. Our security and insurance get compromised easily, we never get huge bonuses for our failures. Yet we are the ones those in positions of power and profit fear most. What have we got then? Our desire to think critically, our will to make things work, and our conscience to guide us through healthy prosperous paths that include others as well as ourselves. We have got the power.
