Imagine, if you will, if you went to a doctor and she said: “Yep, it’s cancer.” And then she left the room. Better yet, she got on the public address system in the office and announced: “This patient has cancer.” And everyone on staff and everyone in the waiting room just nodded about the horrors of it, called some folks they knew to repeat the horrors, emailed their list-serve about it, and then just carried on with their day and their lives.
We’d call that medical malpractice. Because in medicine, we don’t just expect a diagnosis, we also expect one hell of a good faith effort at treatment or, if you will, an activist remedy.
Oh, if modern-day citizenship only carried the same kind of expectations. You know, a simple kind of expectation that would follow the medical lineage between diagnosis and cure. And if we, the citizens, simply acknowledged the problems without effectively addressing them, we’d be accused of citizenship malpractice – a most serious dereliction of duty that has betrayed our ideals, our future, our health, our safety and the very foundation of our democracy that requires citizen leadership.
Consider ourselves charged – on several counts – of citizenship malpractice.
Some of 24 Oranges’ most memorable posts
2 years ago
He's very heroic, isn't he? He's the one that ended the Iraq War and I'm so grateful.
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing those protesters who scaled the cables on the Golden Gate Bridge and hung a banner in protest of the China Olympics and my first thought was Michael Colby turning bright red and screaming that they weren't climbing high enough.