davinevillo's Space http://davinevillo.posterous.com Most recent posts at davinevillo's Space posterous.com Sun, 29 Jul 2012 03:22:25 -0700 Remaining Informed is a Civic Duty http://davinevillo.posterous.com/remaining-informed-is-a-civic-duty http://davinevillo.posterous.com/remaining-informed-is-a-civic-duty

Our idea of citizenship tends to focus on the rights implicit in it, but citizenship is more defined by duties than by rights. We are required to play a role, as watchdog and as advocate, which demands that we remain consistently informed. If we don't think of a major department, such as the Social Security Administration, until we're collecting social security or filling out a disability application, then we are not meeting our civic obligations.

Democracy depends upon citizens being proactive and exhaustive in their effort to remain informed. That is the flaw in democracy: it doesn't work in a society that is unmotivated or ideologically charged because ideas are subjective and facts are objective. The more facts we know, the more able we are to make rational voting decisions. Those decisions not only elect leaders, they frame policy as well.

Now that technology has evolved, every citizen should be able to create a roadmap of all the government benefits that are available to them and of all the government programs that are applicable to them. That roadmap would better help them understand the way in which even politically toxic programs are instrumental to a secure society, and it may direct them to benefits they should be receiving.

Citizens should also be required to take periodic classes that help them to understand statutory evolution so that they can continue to abide by the letter of the law, even when it changes. These citizenship classes would also help to orient individual citizens within a social framework, helping them to understand the government's role.

When we don't understand the government's role in our lives, we are open to misinformation, and misinformation is the tool of manipulators. When we do understand, we are able to decipher misinformation, and we become much more difficult to manipulate. For example, rhetoric is flying about the recent House decision to cut food benefits to poor Americans. In hardworking farming communities there is support for that cut, even though the food benefits generate revenue for the farming industry.

Too often we fail to grasp the context of social programs, looking instead only at how expensive they are or at the people who appear to benefit from them. Understanding that context is beneficial in a number of ways. It allows citizens to see the necessity for some social programs that they might otherwise not support , and it helps supporters of those social programs to see how essential it is to keep them honest.

Good programs need to be protected, but we tend to have such an us-and-them mentality that "protecting" a program almost always means keeping it off the other political party's chopping block. In reality, we need to be most vigilant in our efforts to protect good programs from their own leadership and the bureaucracies that grow up within them. We have to constantly fight to keep them on mission and economically feasible.

Citizenship is a right. It is a luxury. But it is far more than that as well. It is a job, first and foremost, and we should treat it as one. We shouldn't wait until we're filing out a disability application to understand what the Social Security Administration does. We should educate ourselves. We should become its biggest advocate and its most vigilant watchdog. That is what being a citizen is all about.

I'm a SSI consultant with an expert knowledge of disability applications.

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