Understanding the Role of Government

We talk a lot about the rights afforded to us by virtue of our citizenship, but what about the responsibilities? We have a civic duty to understand what our government does, not just to be its watchdog but to be its advocate as well. If we fail in that, if the only time we even think about the Social Security Administration is when we fill out a disability application or start receiving social security checks, then we aren't living up to our obligation as citizens.

Democracy fails when the citizenry ceases to inform itself. It fails when the people become lazy. It fails when the people become too ideologically charged. Facts are objective, and when we get caught up in subjective ideas in defiance of those facts we vote wildly. When we are well informed we vote more rationally. And collectively, our votes are important: they elect leaders, and they influence policy.

Now that technology has evolved, every citizen should be able to create a roadmap of all the government benefits that are available to them and of all the government programs that are applicable to them. That roadmap would better help them understand the way in which even politically toxic programs are instrumental to a secure society, and it may direct them to benefits they should be receiving.

And although it's sad that this is necessary, every citizen should be required to take periodic classes that help us to understand the evolution of statutes and the bureaucracy. Things are always changing, and just as professionals benefit from continuing education so would members of a society. More importantly, those classes would foster communication between the government and the people.

When we don't understand the government's role in our lives, we are open to misinformation, and misinformation is the tool of manipulators. When we do understand, we are able to decipher misinformation, and we become much more difficult to manipulate. For example, rhetoric is flying about the recent House decision to cut food benefits to poor Americans. In hardworking farming communities there is support for that cut, even though the food benefits generate revenue for the farming industry.

The rhetoric that flies around, attempting to sway our opinion one way or the other, rarely gets below the surface. When we get caught up in that rhetoric, we fail to grasp the context of any of the programs the government manages or supports. Without that context, many programs seem misguided. When we understand it, though, we can see the necessity of programs we would otherwise oppose, and we can see the need to keep the programs we find valuable safe from threats.

The need to keep good programs honest and sustainable is a critical nuance of maintaining a robust social and economic framework, but we tend to look at programs in black-and-white, keep-or-cut terms. That's destructive. Once a good program is in place, that's only the beginning of the struggle; from that point on we must remain vigilant in order to ensure that the program achieves its mission in a way that is economically sustainable in the long term.

Being a good citizen is not a right or a luxury; it's a job that each of us must strive to do well. If we don't think about the various roles of the Social Security Administration until we have to fill out a disability application, then we're failing to maintain the kind of familiarity with our government that we need to have to be good citizens.

I'm a social security consultant with an expert knowledge of social security disability applications.