As a Citizen board member, I take to heart The Citizen\u2019s pledge:<\/a><\/p>\n I will stand while others sit. Those are not passive commitments. They are a description of citizenship as a daily practice \u2014 the same practice that has been tested, broken, rebuilt and tested again across 250 years of American history.<\/p>\n That history did not happen in the chambers of power. It happened in the streets and the factories and the courtrooms and the barracks and the bars. It happened because ordinary people \u2014 most of whose names we have forgotten, some of whose names we\u2019ve never known\u2014 did the one thing available to them in the moment they were in.<\/p>\n A soldier wrote a letter.<\/p>\n A woman stood up in a room full of men and spoke in Yiddish.<\/p>\n A teenager held up a phone on a sidewalk as a man\u2019s life was snuffed out by an agent of the state.<\/p>\n Small acts of courage. That changed everything.<\/p>\n Philadelphia is where the most ambitious and expansive experiment in participatory citizenship began.<\/p>\n Not perfectly. Not even close to perfectly. The contradiction at the heart of the Declaration was present from the first moment, in the room where it was written at the corner of 7th and Market streets, where an enslaved man catered to Thomas Jefferson\u2019s needs as he wrote one of the most important yet contradictory documents in the history of the world.<\/p>\n
I will speak when there is silence.
I will read.
I will act.
I will vote.<\/p>\n