SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL

Several years ago they made a couple of comedy westerns that involved the idea of support in terms of a sheriff and later a gunfighter. The idea naturally being drawn from the general social concept of how we as citizens are suppose to stand in alliance with things like the police, firemen and our elected officials.

Well I’m not sure how much we stand in support with elected officials. Mainly that part seems to come when they are from the same party of which we are members. Otherwise they are fair game for our caustic tongue weapons.

And I guess the gist of humor in part from these two movies was derived from the reality of how often support as we call it doesn’t quite occur as we would like in theory. I suppose with the police that is a good thing sometimes. Because I don’t imagine any of us is all that keen on vigilantes being the model of good citizenship.

Still we do struggle with the whole concept of social responsibility. It goes to ever level of existence in terms of our being good citizens to just being members of the society in which we dwell.

There are of course certain kinds of support that are more popular than others. For example paying taxes or serving on a jury don’t exactly fall in the smile category do they? We do them because we have to, if we can’t find a safe way to avoid them.

Whereas if we are talking the kind of support such as donations that are tax deductible well those are easier to muster. That is in part because it doesn’t require that much personal involvement. We can feel comfortable just mailing off a check and letting it be the fullness of our involvement.

Hmmm, I wonder what would happen if we could mail in our need to serve on a jury? You know like have them send us a DVD with all the trial info and then we could watch it and mail off our vote. I can’t help, but think we might get a better response, but that is just me.

In the meantime I celebrate the careful balance in our society between individual freedom and responsibility. What is the bond between the two is too me the thread of personal accountability. Basically as I see it, our exercise our freedom based upon how much we can get away with and act in terms of support depending on how much we fear getting in trouble.

Now that of course is a view of a guy who willingly admits that I based my actions on those criteria and I have a feeling others do to. At least that seems that way from what I see in terms of behavior in others.

And my whole point is to say, hurray folks for being shrewd enough to always balance those two issues in your choices. After all real support means it ought to be you are honestly interested in doing. Thank goodness we have a system that allowance us to take the cowards way out with plenty of excuses if we don’t want to support. Ah, democracy you just have to love it!