Once again, several individuals in many states participated in an American ritual reaffirming for themselves their status as citizens. One thing they might ask something we all might ask; what does citizen mean? If you want to know what a word in English, you check a dictionary. The mother of all dictionaries is the OED, aka The Oxford English Dictionary. The OED does not just give you a current definition. It gives you every definition that the word has had since the first evidence of its use in text. In 1314, a citizen inhabited a city or town and had certain civic rights or privileges. By 1514, a citizen was a townsman as opposed to someone living in the country, or a tradesman instead of a member of the aristocracy. In 1799, Webster Washington wrote of citizens as an enfranchised resident of a country either born there or naturalized this is close to what many consider the definition of citizen is today.
The French aristocrat Alexis De Tocqueville in the middle of the 19th century wrote a classic two-volume study about America, its people, and politics. Its title is Democracy in America. He wrote that he saw the inevitability of political equality for all citizens. He thought that there could be “no middle course between the sovereignty of all and the absolute power of one,” and that any discussion of “political laws in the united States must always begin with the dogma of the sovereignty of the people.”
These definitions and descriptions of the word citizen are completely accurate. Despite this, they fail to convey the true, complete, or the marrow of the meaning of the word. These disembodied concepts fail to convey any knowledge or depth of understanding. As librarians move toward becoming curators of electronic databases and resources we run the risk of leaving behind the knowledge and understanding that comes from reading an entire narrative as contained in a book. If Gandhi or Martin Luther King had Googled the word citizen, would they have ever developed the beliefs and convictions necessary for them to accomplish their heroic achievements? I doubt it. Instead, they read monographs such as Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. This was not a collection of sound bites strung together from several different sources and thoughts of others. It was a carefully crafted philosophical framework that Thoreau could use to guide or justify his actions and beliefs.
He did not believe that a citizen acted from dogma, to do so was to surrender one’s conscience or sovereignty to a tradition. A citizen also could not act just because the law said he must. A true citizen maintained their sovereignty above that of all other people or institutions. When a true citizen obeyed a law, it was because they chose to concede that part of their sovereignty to the lawmaker not because of any authority the lawmaker claimed but because they thought it was right or just. Ultimately, the authority to govern resides with the governed. This also meant the responsibility for the laws and actions of the government resides squarely on the shoulders of the governed. Therefore, if there was any law or any action taken by the government that ran contrary to the conscience or sovereignty of the individual it was their responsibility as a citizen to disobey that law.
Thoreau’s essay laid out this and other concepts in detail. Each part of his argument built upon the part written before. When summarized or chopped up into quotes that sound good, the essay loses its meaning. People may agree with or enjoy what they read or heard from these disembodied pieces, but are unlikely rededicate their lives to being better citizens. That type of change, requires an in depth connection and understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others. It does not come from chunks of electronic text, but from seriously reading the entire narrative of a great thinker and writer.
Once again, we find ourselves in an election year. This year half or more of America’s citizens will lose their rights and be disenfranchised. This will not be because of the actions of their Secretary Of State. It will not be from rigged, hacked, or faulty computer voting machines. It will not even be from U-haul trucks full of ballots being lost dumped or otherwise removed from the count. It will be because they will disenfranchise themselves by staying home instead of voting.
“Citizen” that is the word to learn this year. It can be Googled, plagiarized, described, and talked about, but ultimately to understand it, it must be experienced.
