Written by former GC Youth Fellow Josie Johnson
In high school, I was part of every civics program I could get my hands on: the model legislature, the civic liaisons, the Youth Voice Fellows, Youth for Uplift, the RISE Vote Initiative, and the RI Civic Learning Coalition. You name it, I joined it. I started college believing that if people just knew about civics, they would act on it. More education would lead to more participation, and ultimately, to greater liberty and justice for all. Surrounded by civic enthusiasts, I didn’t realize how divorced I was from the average American, whom I assumed to be merely ignorant of citizenship.
America has not just forgotten its civic duty — we’ve rejected it. And we’ve pitted it against sanity, goodness, and happiness.
Because of my civically oriented schedule, it wasn’t until I started college that I noticed the tension. When my roommate found out I was reading the news, just as I was about to cheerfully proselytize the civic gospel, her face fell. She warned me to be careful and hurriedly invited me to come outside with her, into the sun. She wanted to counteract the news — that nebulous political poison — with time spent tethered to reality, surrounded by goodness, and encountering joy. God’s creation was her first recourse. It was through her that I finally had to confront the brutal truth: nobody wants to act like a real American citizen anymore.
The pitfalls of active citizenship seem clear and inevitable. You want to be sane? Reading the news will isolate you from reality, trap you in an echo chamber, and feed you a steady diet of deranged conspiracy theories. You want to do good in the world? Politics corrupts dreamers, rotting their ideals with red tape and compromise. It’s only the underhanded, the ambitious, and the power-hungry who get their policies passed. You want to be happy? You’ll be angry, lonely, and cynical.
But none of this is inherent to citizenship itself.
In the back of the American mind dwells the belief that at some point, somebody was able to do good through government while preserving their natural decency. But it’s always Washington or Lincoln or King, and always with the asterisk that that was a different time, that it’s not possible anymore. The battle to maintain your joy and your morals while even just paying attention to politics is not one that anyone seems to win nowadays.
It was in encountering this American mindset that I truly appreciated the gift of civic education. I had an education that acknowledged that civics is a battle — not against the right or the left, but against your ability to think and to love and to smile sincerely. That is what you risk when you participate, when you step out into the communal fray, out into the issues of the day. But liberty and justice for all are as worthy to fight for now as they were 250 years ago. We’ve traded our muskets and drums for hope and reason, for sunshine and reliable reporting. And we’re staring down an empire as grand as the colonies ever faced, but I have no doubt that we will win. This conviction is the greatest thing my civics teachers ever gave me.