Do you remember hating Civics Class? I don’t recall much about elementary school, but I do have a visceral imprint of the droll, time-away-from-more-interesting-stuff necessity of learning about how government works and what it meant to be a citizen. Yet, even though I was not particularly engaged, my presence in that class osmosis-ly prepped me for the most important role of living in a Democracy, participation. Americans are, in general, shitty citizens. We take almost everything for granted; the lights will turn on, water, (some of it potable), runs freely from the tap, there are roads, (occasionally not unnavigably pot-holed), to just about everywhere you’d want to travel, there are scientists trying to keep us healthier and more connected, there are policeman and firefighters protecting, (mostly), and serving, doctors and nurses, ambulance drivers and fry cooks tending to our needs, there’s an army to fight our battles and politicians, (public servants?), to legislate policy for our present and future welfare. Civics Class, I think, described the various branches of government, touched on the importance of the mysterious document called the Constitution and, most vividly, pointed out that as soon as we turned 21, (now 18 thanks to 1971’s passage of the 26th Amendment), we would assume the sacred power of being able to vote for the people and ideas we believed were in the best interest of the country. That part I do remember. “The best interest of the Country”…the country, that because of all of those taken-for-granted things, stood for hope and prosperity and a mutual expectation that opportunities awaited ourselves and our neighbors if we minimally did our part and paid our fair share of taxes and followed the basic rules of communal society. We have never achieved anything near-Utopian in scale, but for most of the last half of the 20thcentury, it seemed like we were inching steadily in that direction. So, what happened? Well, I think that we bought into years of PR about the US being the best place on Earth and since none of us individual nincompoops ever felt responsible for that bestness, we ceded, more and more, the responsibility of investing in our civic obligation, to at least know the issues and the candidates, to special interest lobbyists who have undermined, in plain sight, everything decent about our democracy. We vote at a shamelessly low percentage rate and then complain that things aren’t working out the way we’d hoped. Khan Academy has a free course in US Government and Civics. It should be mandatory for all citizens.