#2

Did you read the entire article Ebs? The author in no way makes any case that every single American should be immersed in the daily minutiae of politics. His point is the opposite. Many Americans not only don't pay attention to what happens in the political sphere, the majority aren't even knowledgeable about the basic tenets of the US Constitution including their own rights and responsibilities as citizens.

Our democracy depends upon its citizens knowing and understanding the basics of governing and government. Poll after poll shows that this understanding simply doesn't exist anymore as it did generations ago.

In a 2009 survey of 1,000 adults by the American Revolution Center, a nonpartisan educational group, 60% knew that reality TV's Jon and Kate Gosselin had eight kids. But more than one-third didn't know in which century the American Revolution had occurred, and half believed that either the War of 1812 or the Civil War preceded it.

Ninety percent of those survey participants said knowledge of the American Revolution and its principles is extremely important, yet 83% failed a basic test on knowledge of our founding, with an average score of 44%.

A dozen years later, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, also a nonpartisan educational institution, found that while two-thirds of participants could name all three branches of government, nearly one-fifth couldn't name any.

Only 1 in 20 could name all five freedoms protected by the First Amendment (speech, religion, the right to assembly, freedom of the press, and the right to petition the government). Over a fifth said the First Amendment protected the right to bear arms. (Nope. Second Amendment.)

How can you cherish or work to protect freedoms if you don't know them? How does one hold the elected accountable if one does not understand the nature and prerogatives of each branch and how the power of each is kept in check?

Over half said Facebook is required to let all Americans express themselves freely on its platform under the First Amendment. (It is not.)

You want worse? A 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey of 18-to-24-year-olds found that only 14% of participants could find Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Israel on a map - a map, by the way, that had the countries lettered on it.

The very complaints about our current national politics are based on the fact that people who should know better have allowed them to fall into such pathetic condition - nominally because they can count on lemming-like tribal behavior even in the face of criminal convictions and outright fraudulent actions.

This topic comes back to the words of Ben Franklin uttered at the birth of this nation as one governed by laws and regulations agreed upon by the governed: "It's a republic, if you can keep it." Keeping it demands an informed citizenry, something current research shows that we no longer have.

It's about ..........Trump.

Yes and no. The first polling cited was from 2009 - when Barack Obama was President and before Trump entered the political zeitgeist.

However, I'll concede that Trump has become the leader of the under and uniformed - raking in billions of dollars and filling his own bank accounts with dubious fundraising pleas to assuage his endless grievances.

So in no way does this author think this started with Trump. It didn't. As a matter of fact, the final paragraph implies that we as Boomers bear responsibility for allowing this to happen on our watch. And I tend to agree. We allowed the unimportant primacy over the important. The health of our democracy was our duty to protect and nurture like any healthy mature plant passed from each generation to the next. We let the diseases of disinterest, willful ignorance, and neglect take root and now our plant is in critical condition, possibly terminally. We have no one to blame but ourselves should we lose what Franklin wondered if we'd be able to keep.

I am sure you'll disagree, but the evidence is overwhelming.

I don't disagree at all! But we may disagree as to why this has happened, and to me it's an "us" problem, not necessarily a partisan one.

To me, we deemphasized the things that don't specifically lead to future financial success trying to insure that kids grow into the gainfully employed instead of welfare recipients. I think civics became like art classes. Cute, but not necessary for most. And let's not forget that we can't even agree on what American history is anymore particularly if it shows white Americans in a less than positive light for coming to this continent and eventually taking it over by hook or crook from the true first Americans - the indigenous peoples who were already here. Nope, too controversial now that Black Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans (et._al.), have the opportunity of truthfully recounting their own unique experiences as immigrants to America, none of them based on being the oppressors instead of the oppressed. But that's now considered woke.

So civics has become just another third rail that we intentionally avoided too much to our own detriment.

#16

I couldn't agree more. The most frustrating thing of all to me is that this has never been an argument about "left" or "right," it's always been a disagreement about right and wrong. All I want is for people to viscerally and internally understand the objective truths, facts, and history that has brought us to today. I don't want to tell others how they should feel about those things, simply that we can agree that x or y actually happened, and z came out of the events.