Civic Duty: All People Should...

For some, the question of civic duty would not be very difficult.
"Of course there are things EVERYONE needs to do! Paying taxes! Voting! Reporting suspicious activity!"
      I, however, find the concept of civic duty pretty complex. There are certain duties that citizens owe to the government that protects them and ensures a measure of their well-being, but defining civic duty as "ALL people should..." puts quite the spin on the question. As you may know, I am quite the crusader for the rights of individuals, and so I am generally opposed to a binding commitment to a set of actions that are loosely defined as "civic duties." So, we perform them. What does that make us? Good citizens? Virtuous human beings? Not really, but they are widely considered the basic guidelines for how a citizen should behave considering the duty that he owes to his government. My opinion is that civic duties, as defined by the State, should be performed insofar as they do not conflict with one's moral or ethical principles.
       I find it difficult to think of myself as governed, even though that is entirely naive and I am wholly governed as a citizen of the U.S. As a result of this mental quirk, I cannot easily agree when someone puts forth a list of things that I MUST do, seemingly by virtue of simply EXISTING. That is easier to conceive as an immigrant to the U.S, because it is, in a sense, an opportunity for me to be here rather than in Belarus, but I would definitely find exception with the idea of rigid civic duties that I MUST perform as a natural-born citizen of America. The civic duties that a government expects its citizens to perform must necessarily reflect its ideology and value system, and so with everything that the government declares and forces on the populace, the question must be: Is what I'm being told to do/believe what I REALLY want to do/ what I rationally believe? If the answer is yes, perform your civic duties. If you find fault with the instructions, don't follow them and write your own. Of course, this comes across as pretty childish, but I think that it really just puts a lot of stock in the individual; something that can rarely, if ever, be done because, unfortunately, people often tend towards idiocy.

I've been rambling (I'm sure it comes across) and I've pretty much exhausted my pool of ideas on this topic, so I guess I'm done. Thanks for reading if you did.