Notes on Citizenship

A passport is a fact. Citizenship is a practice. The first is granted by a government; the second is earned, or avoided, through a thousand small acts nobody is watching.

We tend to reduce citizenship to the ballot box, which is a bit like reducing marriage to the wedding. The ceremony matters, but the marriage is the Tuesday. So too the republic - it is sustained not in the year of the election but in the ordinary years between them.

The citizen's tasks are small and unphotogenic: attending the meeting nobody else attended, paying attention to a policy that will never make you famous, resisting the easy contempt for people on the other side.

I do not write this to scold. I write it because I am prone to forgetting. It is easier to be cynical about the collective than to be its patient member. But cynicism is a holiday from citizenship, not a substitute for it.