Duty and the Responsibility of Citizenship -- The Basis for a Strong Nation part 4

THE BASIS FOR A STRONG NATION By R.J. Godlewski © March 21, 2008, All Rights Reserved 4. Duty and the Responsibility of Citizenship

Occasionally I write a piece for which I am quite proud, believing that I have used just the right combination of personal experience, practical insight, and even challenging humor to get my point across. Such is the case with this particular installment of the Basis for a Strong Nation series; I had begun my narrative with profound reflection upon an episode in which a young sailor and his Navy buddy were deployed to the Philippines for the first time and were embarking upon a tour of one of that nation’s rather colorful and infamous cities when the buddy’s wallet was stolen and a plainclothes police officer shot the perpetrator – a small boy – after inquiring whether the wallet needed to be recovered or not. I wanted to draw a parallel between our desire for instant justice and the implications involving the death of a young offender who merely wanted to support his family in a climate of abject poverty as the basis for responsibility of our actions. However, I soon found that I just could not release that particular writing and quickly actuated that technological miracle known as “deleting.” As I am the only person on this planet that knows what those words were, I feel a strong sense of absolute power over my peers. Yet, as this is a piece exclusively about duty and responsibility, I found that I must explain my actions even if the world will never be able to judge my efforts in their original context.

I write these words – the ones that you are permitted to read – as we reach Easter weekend, the climax of a religious season known simply as Holy Week. When confronted with Christ’s own death for our sins, I find that any other semblance to duty and responsibility pales very much in comparison. My Lord died for what I – we – have done. God knows that I have many transgressions for which a lifetime of “cruel and unusual punishment” would be quite apropos. Instead, my God decided that we humans were worth the effort to come down here and literally sacrifice Himself in order that we might ‘live’. Now I understand why the Bible came to be because “God moved the human authors of the Scriptures to understand and freely will to write precisely what He wished them to write.” We’d be in very much trouble if I myself had to explain what this weekend is all about.

There’s another reason that I had chosen to delete my original piece. At the present, I am authoring these words very early in the morning hours – it is 4 A.M. – because I have taken a month away from my literary and business duties to provide care for my parents. My dad is in his ninetieth year and there is very little reason to expect that he’ll actually witness his birthday in November. He suffers from Alzheimer’s and, today, his condition is quickly deteriorating wherein he recognizes very little of his family and spends his nights conversing in Polish – a language that hasn’t been required since his childhood. My mother is eighty years old herself and cannot possibly handle him twenty-four hours per day so I basically take the ‘midnight shift’ so that she can sleep. I find that I am quite prepared to handle this particular crisis because it was just a ‘short’ four years ago that I lost my own wife to cancer after a multi-year battle that saw me emerge as her primary caregiver. To be perfectly honest, I’d have to admit that I’d rather be anywhere else at the present than within their cramped little house and aiding my father in his “call of nature” duties every twenty minutes or so but, hey, the rest of my siblings have families of their own to attend to.

So, for my part, my writing is largely on hold, my business activities (such as they are) are on auto-pilot, and even my counterterrorism activities are strained. I have only one mother and father and they trump everything else in existence save for our Creator. Call it duty if you want; for me it’s simply being responsible as a loving son. Therefore, you have the two primary reasons that I have chosen to trash my original writing. First, Easter simply shatters any comparison. Even a hardcore atheist could not find a better description of duty than the story of a God “who created everything in Heaven and on Earth” becoming man in order to die to save us from our own sins. Trust me, we novelists aren’t good enough to envision a storyline such as that. Secondly, despite my patriotism, my lifelong desire to defeat the Islamists, and my many business pursuits I find that I must drop all and care for my parents – each representing the first “native-born Americans” within my family. Rather, I should say that it is specifically because of my family that I am a proud patriot, a defender of the faith, and an entrepreneur.

My father, for example, is a colorful if not an overly achieving individual. If there was a simple statement that would magically recall his ninety years of existence, it would have to be “hard work.” He grew up in Hamtramck, Michigan – Pole Town then; Islam Town now – and worked his way through a notorious street gang emerging to witness the early evolution of American Unionism. Jimmy Hoffa himself once bailed my father out of jail when his group was arrested on charges of illegally picketing an unscrupulous employer. My dad also served proudly as a medic in the Army Air Corps during World War II and though he remained stateside his many stories of famous compatriots or events make for great conversation. Regardless of these experiences, perhaps my father’s greatest claim to fame is simply rearing his five children (my parents lost a sixth and a seventh).

My dad put in his hours, often in horribly brutal automotive factories, simply so that my mother could remain at home and take care of us. We had very few possessions and deplorable living conditions – the seven of us shared a bathroom where you could literally sit on the commode, brush your teeth, and check the bath water (dad installed a shower later on) simultaneously. Regardless, we had each other and my parents still managed to work in a trip to California and one to Florida before my thirteenth birthday at which time I found that I could earn enough from a paper route to finance my own trip to California with an older sister. We also learned to swim, to hunt, to fish, and to camp – things remarkably ancient when compared with their more contemporary distractions. If it weren’t for the fact that I often embarked upon “UDT” missions down our canal to shoot frogs or egg the neighborhood villain’s house during Devil’s Night (day before Halloween for you deprived types. ;o) ) while as a youngster, I doubt very much that I could work with my counterterrorism ambitions today. They haven’t invented a videogame yet that can take the place of working your way through neck deep mud, filth, and snapping turtles the size of manhole covers!

In reflection upon both Easter and my father’s slow demise, I find that it is nearly impossible to write about duty and responsibility in the context of being a human individual. However, both of these situations do offer some suggestions as to what the duties and responsibilities are for citizens – particularly here within America. The greatest obligation is, of course, that each one of us must live to serve our fellow citizens. We may not be the cause of their sins, but we are responsible for their care and conduct by virtue of our commonality. We simply cannot ignore their existence anymore than God could ignore ours. Servitude to our fellow man is the shoulder on which our nation rests.

The second greatest obligation concerns our families – without which we could never exist as terrestrial beings. My own parents have instilled upon me the foundations for what I consider to be the perfect working model: a father that makes every sacrifice imaginable to ensure that his family is fed, clothed, sheltered, and healthy even if it means living the better part of a century with no other recognizable achievements; and a mother who eliminates personal desires of her own to ensure that her children are never left to the care of strangers, or to the state, or beyond earshot of a cry for help. Because of their unified commitment towards their family, both of my parents further served to introduce us children to a lifelong devotion to our Creator which is, quite appropriate, because His greatest gift to us is our earthly lives in the care of these very same parents. That we had nothing else – my parents could never afford anything near a comparative lifestyle as to what exists in ‘modern culture’ today – never became a concern of ours because we had each other and none of us are more than a fifteen-minute drive or a telephone call away today. And that goes for our nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews too.

Another demanding obligation rests with the duties of being Americans period. My father’s parents came from Poland and my mother’s from Austria and it would therefore be relatively easy to expect our family to be based upon either the Polish or German languages. No. My grandparents believed in America – which is why they left their native lands in the first place – and were deeply proud of their heritage, but they knew that being in America meant observing the English language and so my siblings and I – being only a single generation removed from the Old Country – had to go out of our way to learn the very little of the ‘old’ languages that we do understand.

Hard work is also a duty and a grave responsibility for citizens. Aside from social security – which was paid for through five decades of personal effort on their part – neither of my parents drew upon the state for their existence. My father was unemployed on several occasions, including once in which my sister was severely injured and though there were benefits to pay for her care my parents did not demand one penny for their own care without working for it. My father left high school at sixteen to aid his parents and did not retire until damaged lungs and feet (one from poor factory ventilation and the other from poor safety standards) forced him to quit. Maybe this is why I write these words from their home instead of mine.

Military duty – leastways service to our nation – is another facet of life that I inherited from my father. Someone has to ‘pay’ for our blessings just as much as my father had to struggle in a dark and dirty automotive forging plant (nothing like the clean, automated examples from today) to keep us kids fed and sheltered. Again, my father achieved very little stature but that wasn’t the point; his country had been attacked, his people at war, and there was no protest over what had to be accomplished: victory at all costs, even if his particular role was merely serving as a lowly medic while his more famous compatriots – such as Gene Autry and Red Skeleton – were catered to. Every generation demands a soldier and as this ex-sailor sits here caring for his slowly dying soldier father, we both know that we did our part so that I could type these words freely and that he could slowly pass away within the comforts of his own home.

Regardless of generational differences, there is one underlying characteristic that encapsulates both my father and me and that is our deep love for our nation. He the eternal “worker” and lifelong-until-very-much-recently Democrat who sacrificed his body so that his family could eat and me the obsessive if not extraordinarily successful entrepreneur and Republican who is glad to sacrifice both mind and body so that I might be able to have a family someday. That he is soldiering on through his end times and that I am sailing on through what might become the equivalent of his second half of life – he is now for the first time, in what is most probably his very last year, twice as old as his son – makes no never mind. We’ve expressed concerns about our nation and its citizens. We have even held a gripe or two that our nation was “going to the dogs.” Yet, neither one of us has ever held the notion that America was inherently evil or expressed the thought that we preferred to live anywhere else. We aren’t simply an aging Democrat soldier who spent his life eking out a living in a factory or a middle-aged Republican sailor who’s sacrificed peace of mind to ensure that he could provide future employment to others at his expense. We’re Americans first and foremost and both of us are damn proud of that fact. Maybe that’s the ultimate responsibility for any citizen – simply being true to who we really are.


NEXT WEEK: Political Warfare and the Proliferation of the Vote.

(The above article is the 4th in a series by R. J. Godlewski, exclusively for Right Truth. A new installment will be published each Monday. Please leave your comments or questions for Mr. Godlewski here in the comments section and he will respond.)

This is the 4th article in the series, THE BASIS FOR A STRONG NATION. Chapter One in the series, "A Return to American basics" is found here and Chapter Two, "What is an American?" can be found here and Chapter Three, "One Nation Without God?" can be found here.

Be sure to check out Mr. R.J. Godlewski's website here and the Independent Counterterrorist Training Program written by Mr. Godlewski for Right Truth.
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Comments

[Rosemary]

Absolutely awesome. Thank you, and have a wonder and blessed Happy Easter.

[Skunkfeathers]

I'd much rather read the account above, than the drivel from a flaming racist, any time ;)

[Angel]

a joy to read a proud Americans views Deb!