Our stormy present requires citizen activism. We shouldn’t look to big government or big business to create the solutions we need, but rather to big citizenship and a renewed sense of common purpose.
Big citizenship means contributing to a cause larger than your own self-interest. It calls on each and every one of us to perform community service, to get involved in politics, and to join with other citizens in larger movements for change.
It says we need to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in the public, private, and non-profit sectors to develop the new ideas and solutions we need to address the new problems we face.
Big citizenship calls on us to define a new catalytic and transparent role for government, one that ensures a level playing field, monitors performance, uses competition and choice, and rewards and scales up what works while recognizing and shutting down what doesn’t.
Big citizenship recognizes that we should forge public-private partnerships among all three sectors that can leverage the strengths of each to address our most pressing challenges.
Most of all, a new philosophy of big citizenship and common purpose demands that we move away from the old, misguided question of “Are you better off?” to the real question: “Are we better off?” We must reassert the spirit of our founding fathers and mothers who “mutually pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor”—the spirit that we are all in this together.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Big Citizenship
A new book, Big Citizenship, deals with a major theme of our text.
