Many Rights, Few Responsibilities

I became a citizen of the United States on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, holding my newborn daughter. Sitting in a room at the University of Maine, I listened to a speech made by an administrator who spoke not of the benefits of citizenship but of its responsibilities: to participate in civic engagement, to vote, to speak out against injustice. There was a note of despair to the address, in that way things sound when we speak of what we hope will happen while being fully conscious of the horror of what is actually going to come to pass.

“Why do you want to become a citizen?” I was asked this by a local TV reporter as I strode in my sari to cut a large chocolate cake decorated to resemble the American flag—not because I had been appointed to do so but because everybody else seemed too nervous to disrupt the red, white, and blue. “I want to demonstrate what it means to be a citizen,” I replied. “I want to give my American daughters a model of citizenship where pride in one’s country does not absolve one of working to mend its ills.”

All these years later, I find that my answer to the reporter still stands. I have a deep allegiance to Sri Lanka, the country where I was born, and the call-and-response of America, where I now live, comes to me as a responsibility. To teach my daughters the same loyalty to the land of their birth that I feel for my own, I have to let the country where I have raised them get under my skin. In the face of overwhelming evidence of my love for Sri Lanka, I must demonstrate my love for America in ever more meaningful ways.

Love for a country must surely carry with it love for its many parts. To claim love for this country and yet care not a whit for the public education of other people’s children, or the fate of young people too poor to have any other choice but to risk their lives at war, or the abandonment of people whose skin color marks them for a lifetime of injustice, is to exist in a vacuum where you possess but a superficial understanding of those two words: love, country.

And, so, I have discovered that love is a responsibility that has little to do with rights. I have listened, time and again, to Americans who can quote the First, the Second, the Fourth, and the Fifth constitutional Amendments. Rarely have I heard my fellow citizens speak up on behalf of the other amendments—the Thirteenth, the Fourteenth, and the Fifteenth, for instance, crafted to ensure dignity, due process, and equality, respectively, whose language speaks to the creation of the perfect union that we all seek and requires us to make a more nuanced reading of those other, more popular amendments.

An interpretation of rights unrelated to responsibility does not speak to me of love of country or of patriotism. We live among others in a social agreement where the laws governing our rights provide a guide to the responsibility each of us has toward others. Those laws should be the last resort in our interactions, to be summoned when all conversation is spent, when all negotiation is done—in other words, when we are broken.

As a Sri Lankan, I grew up understanding that what is given freely must still be earned. A free education must be earned by upholding respect for education and rigorous intellectual pursuits. Free health care must still be earned by the purchase and consumption and, if possible, the cultivation of native vegetables, fruits, and herbs. The freely given affections of parents and grandparents and extended family must be earned by a willingness to tend to the elderly, a consideration for the dying, and the transmission of those values to a younger generation.

The freedoms that Americans are so quick to mention are no different. They, too, ought to be earned. We ought to deserve them, somehow. That somehow...