the smedley log - suburban scrawl

Citizen Chris (more on our part of the bargain)

First, thanks to Cziltang for emailing a link to me. It’s the Change Agents page from the website of the Maxim Institute in New Zealand. Some worthwhile suggestions to consider.

Then there’s this Sunday address from Inquirer Editorial Page Editor, Chris Satullo, written as an exhortation to new graduates, and worthy of being read by everyone:

… Each citizen of America is invited to take part in a superb experiment in self-governance and liberty. This is a noble charge. Why do so many treat it as a burden, a trifle?

People will spend hours on a Web site researching which MP3 player or hybrid golf club to buy – but claim to have no time to read up on what their government is doing in their names.

Being a citizen involves more than voting. Voting, lamentably, has become the most consumerlike activity of citizenship. Too many people judge candidates the same way they pick a Toyota dealer: Who’s offering me the cheapest deal?

To be a citizen is to claim your place in a whole that transcends private interests. To be a citizen is to safeguard a legacy of liberty for which millions have dreamed, labored and risked lives. Citizens should never let partisan quarrels dwarf the bond they share with each fellow citizen.

To be a citizen, you must learn to pay attention, to listen, to count to 10. You must learn the value of things on which no dollar value can be fixed. …(Read the rest of Satullo’s column)

“Be an intellectual bungee-jumper; go beyond your comfort zone in what you read, what you see, where you visit and whom you seek out.”

I like this – especially as this seems to imply a willingness to grant validity to people whose views are in contrast to your own and to try to perceive why they’d think like that. Conversely, Cranky Epistle’s (a Philly area college prof’s blog) latest entry talks about a fundamentalist students calling her to task for assigning a story (Intro to Lit, I think) where people engage in acts he find sinful.

“God is watching, even when no one else is. It is far worse to disappoint the merciful than the unjust.”

I happen not to be religious but I get major warm fuzzy feelings when someone thinks about religion outside the box like that. I know it’s just a blurb, I must be too jaded for just a blurb to make me think he’s stretching. But I really like the concept – don’t disobey God because you fear his wrath, but it’s not unlike disappointing the 80YO sweet granny/great aunt/whoever who would just be sad and hurt over you disappointing her. Or at least that was the instant visualization I got from the blurb.

These have to be my 2 faves from the many good blurbs this had. Thanks