PLATFORM : Responsibility
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in a commencement speech at Harvard: “It is time to promote human responsibility.” Winston Churchill said essentially the same thing: “The price of greatness is responsibility.”
What these great men were saying is that a society will be able to survive only as long as citizens are as conscious of their obligations as they are of their rights.
In contemporary America, stress has been placed almost exclusively on the rights of the individual. But, without acknowledging our obligations, democratic society will find itself in serious trouble.
Alexander Hamilton’s description of the fall of Athens may someday be applied to us. “When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free. And it was never free again.”
So the purpose of the Statue of Responsibility would be to remind us that the responsibility for history resides on the shoulders of each of us and that freedom is in danger unless umbilically tied to personal obligations.
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