Many Rights Few Responsibilities

I’m over at LitHub today, with the opening essay to a new feature in the Virginia Quarterly Review. The print issue, on Citizenship, is well worth a read – and VQR in general is one of the best journals out there. Here’s an excerpt (below). You can read the complete essay here.

Love for a country must surely carry with it love for its many parts. To claim love for this country and yet care not a whit for the public education of other people’s children, or the fate of young people too poor to have any other choice but to risk their lives at war, or the abandonment of people whose skin color marks them for a lifetime of injustice, is to exist in a vacuum where you possess but a superficial understanding of those two words: love, country.