“I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.” – George Bernard Shaw

Monday, during one of the sunny spells between frequent rain showers, Max and I walked around our immediate neighborhood. Maybe I have been focusing so much on what we’ve been doing at our house I haven’t been paying attention, but I was struck by how fresh and inviting the historic district looks this summer.

The walk was a nice change from the intense and seemingly endless weeding I had been doing all morning, and I thought about how much a neighborhood like ours depends on the day-to-day attention and courtesies of so many people. Picking up, putting away trashcans, pulling weeds, mowing grass, repairing shutters, trimming trees, washing windows, touching up paint, removing junk… and so much more.

There is no coordination, no official “to-do” list for folk to follow, just scores of homeowners up and down these streets simply doing what it takes.

To me it’s a profound commentary on our freedoms, our rights, our responsibilities and how life is supposed to work.

Rights and Responsibilities:

I remember a civics class I was teaching to middle-schoolers. One of the students consistently pushed back against some of my classroom rules; he yanked the “Student Handbook” out of his backpack. “This is all about my rights,” he tried to lecture me, “I know what my rights are and you can’t tell me what to do….”

He thought he had me! But I asked him to turn to the table of contents. “How many pages are there outlining your rights?” I asked him, “I know this is civics but a little math while we’re at it never hurts….” The number he came up with was somewhere around twenty-five.

“Now see if you can calculate the number of pages in the section headed ‘Student Responsibilities,'” I continued.

“Errr, that’s closer to fifty,” he said.

“Right. And thanks for making an important point so we can talk about it today. No, seriously, I am glad you brought this up.”

I went on to lead a conversation around how taking our responsibilities seriously serves to make our rights all the more worthwhile, including the responsibility to protect the rights of others – especially people we disagree with.

“It is your right as students to expect me to treat you with courtesy and respect,” I told the class. “But it is your responsibility to respect my work as a teacher and to respect the right of other students to experience a productive learning environment.”

In this neighborhood we don’t need to go around instructing each other on rights and responsibilities. However, in the more broad context of public life too many of us tend to default to latent middle school behavior and loudly demand our own rights while tramping on those of people we disagree with, all the while forgetting that none of this works outside of our faithfulness and mutual trust when it comes to what is at least two-thirds of the equation… our responsibilities.

Because it’s not about “me”, it’s about “us” – DEREK