I agree with the concept that you can’t legislate apathy and complacency away. However, you can implement safe guards to prevent the ill effects on others. This is the whole concept behind civilization – combining efforts and resources by entering into agreements to minimize the ill effects of the poor choices (i.e. tyranny, deception, apathy, and complacency) of others. An individual has every right to become complacent and apathetic, just as the individual has the right to have tyranical and deceptive thoughts. However, the moment these thoughts manifest themselves agressively in the lives of others, that is where their rights end. Legislation is simply unable to eliminate undesirable thoughts in anyone. Legislation should only be about protecting every individual from the agression of others.

In the meanwhile, however, I will attempt to nurture the love of liberty above all in every way I know how in the hope that my fears will not be realized and we may at least stave off, if not reverse the impending tyranny I foresee. America is increasinly less the nation it was in my childhood just 20 years ago, and though it is an unpopular opinion, it is nevertheless fully supportable by the legislative record that Republicans and Democrats are if not equally guilty, they are nearly so, in bringing to pass the destruction of our Constitutional protections and bringing us ever closer to the tyranny of a combination of socialism and corporate feudalism.

John, thank you for your insights. I always enjoy what you have to say. It is a sad fact of our current culture that many natural citizens don’t educate their children about their part of the agreement involved in citizenship. As a culture, we have become complacent and apathetic in general. I believe this could be safeguarded against by requiring some active agreement as a requirement of all citizens. Minors would not full citizens, but fall under the protection of their guardians’ citizenship until they are willing and able to take on the full responsibilities of citizenship. There could possibly be a requirement of having their guardians’ approval before the age of 18 in order to enter into that agreement, or something, to allow for more mature young adults, who are ready to assume the responsibilities of citizenship early. What say you?

The benefits of membership are, put simply, the protection of not only their unalienable rights, but more particularly their civil rights — those rights frequently afforded only to those who are citizens of a nation, not merely residents; such as the privilege of casting a vote in electing one’s leaders, the privilege of owning real property (land, buildings, etc.) protected by the society, the privilege of engaging in commerce and trade or operating a business, the privilege of being elected to and holding a public office, etc.

Some suppose that citizenship comes too easily to those who attain it by the happenstance of birth, or with too great difficulty by those of foreign origin who desire it. I tend to disagree with such a notion except where citizenship is granted to the child of foreign nationals for no other reason than because that child is born on U.S. soil. The purpose of a test for citizenship, I believe, is primarily two-fold: to ensure the loyalty of the propsective citizen to their new Nation as fas as is reasonably possible, and to ensure that the prospective citizen has a solid foundational basis for understanding not only their rights, but their duties as members of their new Nation. It is presumed, perhaps erroneously, that those who are natural citizens (by birth) would be indoctrinated in such things by their parents and the educational system they subscribe to by the time they become fully autonomous citizens.

However this is not true about the Constitution’s protections. Currently, a person does not even have to know what his Constitutional rights (or privileges to avoid confusion ) are in order to have them protected under the current constitution. A man ignorant of his 5th amendment privileges, for example, does not have to even cure his ignorance in order to have them protected. Under the Constitution it is the obligation of the court and the court officers to protect his 5th amendment privileges. Our Constitutional privileges are not currently protected on condition of active or even passive participation.

Jordon, I agree. A larger portion of those who benefit from US citizenship today believe that the government is some obscure, nameless entity, known only as “the government” to which we have some mystical duty to honor and obey under the justification of the “good of society” or some other “greater good.” In reality, government is not an entity of any kind. It is the stewardship each individual has for his own self-government. What the common vernacular refers to as “the government” is actually just the word we use to describe the agreement between the individual and those to whom he has delegated the responsibility of some of their own self-government, because it is often more effective to combine efforts to protect inalienable rights. According to my own understanding of truth, it is only because of a contractual agreement, into which the individual freely enters, that a moral requirement of “obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law” is valid. I believe this is what Thomas Jefferson was writing about in the Declaration of Independence when he wrote, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” Once the consent of the governed is withdrawn, there is no moral ground for any governmental authority. Any authority assumed under any other circumstances is tyranny, and unrighteous dominion.