'Citizenship' - Where does it rank in your life?

April 8, 2007
Chris Satullo
Inquirer Editorial Page Editor

The Sunday Breakfast Club, a quietly august discussion group for leaders in this area, got together the other night to kick off its 75th anniversary year.

Themes for the evening were leadership, friendship and citizenship. I was invited to talk about the last one of those. That induced me to piece together some thoughts on the topic that have been rattling about in my brain.

I sort of liked the result, so, with your indulgence, here it is:

Citizenship.

There's a noble word, but one that has lost much of its luster from misuse and overuse.

Citizenship. If you're like me, you've endured years of dull social studies lectures and bad Fourth of July speeches belaboring the word.

So, by now, what feelings does the word citizenship conjure in your heart? Something dutiful and dreary, I'd wager. Not something thrilling. Not something sacred.

Yet, here we are, citizens of Philadelphia, the city where the sacred nature of that word was proclaimed so audaciously to the world in 1776.

And where the practical meanings of citizenship were embodied in the Constitution in 1787.

If any city should keep holy the word citizenship, it is Philadelphia. If any place should take on the task of rescuing this word from the slagheap of cliché, it is this city.

What do they mean, these words, citizenship and citizen?

We all have multiple identities. By that I don't mean we're all auditioning for a bad Hollywood thriller. I mean we all have different loyalties, roles, senses of belonging. These all contribute to the mosaic of who we are.

What are some of my identities? I'm a Christian. I'm a father and a husband. A brother, a son and an uncle. A journalist (or, in the current fashion, a biased hack). A political centrist. A very mediocre but very persistent golfer. A Phillies fan and a Cleveland Indians fan (which speaks to a deep ability to absorb punishment and to keep hope alive past all reason). I'm a Nissan owner. And I am a very, very bad dancer. (Trust me on that one.)

Yes, I listed those identities in descending order of importance.

If I'd included in this list my identity as citizen of the United States of America and the Philadelphia community, where would I have put it?

Before I answer that question, let me put the same one to you. If you honestly listed your various identities in order of their centrality to your sense of who you are, where would your citizenship in America - or in Philadelphia - go in that personal hierarchy? How do they fit into the mosaic called you?

When I look around these days, I fear something. I fear that all too many people, if they are being honest, not merely saluting cliché, would have to slot their identity as citizen pretty far down on their list.

They'd have to put it somewhere around where I put my status as a truly horrific dancer. For many, citizen ranks well below other identities that have to do with tribal loyalties or, God help us, brand loyalties.

Now, let me answer my own question, about me.

Folks, I'm a democratic sap. And I'm hopelessly in love with Philadelphia. For me, my citizenship in the American republic ranks high in my hierarchy of identities, just behind faith and family. So does my citizenship in this community, this legacy of William Penn's holy experiment.

That, I would hope, is the way it is for you, too, and for all of our fellow citizens. That is not, I fear, the way it is for too many of us.

Here's the thing. Humans are the beings that thirst to belong. We will belong somewhere, even if it kills us - as it often does for the angry youths who fill our city's haunted streets with gunfire.

The tragedy is how often the identities that we grab onto in this quest to belong somewhere actually serve to separate us, to close us off from our fellow citizens. These identities insist: I am part of a small, superior We. The rest of you belong to the inferior Them.

Such tribal or consumer identities should not be the most sacred ones. We should cling most fervently not to the identities that divide and differentiate, but to the ones that reach out, that link us to so many of our fellow humans.

For an American, a person blessed by the legacy bequeathed us by the brave men and great deeds of Independence Hall, the identity of Citizen should be one of the most prized.

What does that mean in practice? It means that no matter how much other citizens of this republic, this city, differ from us - in income, skin color, class, faith, education, work history or political belief - they still can never get outside of our sacred circle, nor we theirs. We are bound to one another, all of us, by that shared core identity of citizen. No matter what divides or angers us, in the end we are in this together. No one, but no one, is beyond the pale.

We are in this together. True as that is for the nation writ large, how vividly true it is for this community. To be a citizen of Philadelphia, to drink that particular wooder, means certain things.

We are all heirs of William Penn, his dream of civic perfection, of freedom of belief, and of beautiful order. And heirs, too, of Rocky Balboa, lovers of grit over glitz, connoisseurs of persistent effort despite failure, romantic strivers to the core, no matter how profane our speech, or humble our dress.

As part of The Inquirer's and the University of Pennsylvania's Great Expectations project, I've been all over this city and region this year, talking to some of its most idealistic and committed citizens. We've held forums with more than a thousand folks, in church basements, libraries and rec centers all over the map.

Let me tell you this: Citizenship is alive in this city. People care. They love this place, as a physical place of green spaces and historic bricks, and as an expression of spirit.

They care. And they want to believe. They want someone to summon them to a higher sense of citizenship, an ethic of belonging and caring and serving that goes beyond the grubby quid pro quos of politics as usual.

They want to be citizens of Philadelphia in the way William Penn, Benjamin Franklin and Richardson Dilworth taught us to be.

But they are, like all wounded idealists, scared and cynical. They need to be encouraged. They need to hear a clarion call to unleash the better angels of their nature.

Sounds like a job for all of us.