21st Century Citizenship, November 2022: Homecoming?
Fall is the time when high school and college graduates return to their almae matres and come together to share what they've learned and hope for. The recent elections felt something like a homecomin...
21st Century Citizenship, October 2022: Money
If love of it is, as the Bible says, "the root of all evil," what does it mean that we as a nation value money so much? And what might we choose as our cultural currency instead?...
21st Century Citizenship, September 2022: Mental Health
Mental health has always been a problem for a segment of Americans. The pandemic, political polarization, and now inflation have increased the size of that segment substantially, turning what Freud ...
21st Century Citizenship, August 2022: The News
As the Founders created their new form of government, they quickly realized the need for checks on its power, from which emerged, most sweepingly, the 1st Amendment. But as our democracy comes under f...
21st Century Citizenship, July 2022: Branches
Many of our earliest flags and symbols were arboreal for good reason; like a tree, our democracy has sheltered us from the elements and spread wide to embrace all denizens, but some today fail to unde...
21st Century Citizenship, June 2022: Distortion
We've been told repeatedly in recent years that we're living in an increasingly Orwellian Brave New World, which might be true if Orwell and Huxley had been dropping acid as they wrote. ...
21st Century Citizenship, May 2022: 21st Century Jobs
All across the country, it's commencement season again, and leaders are fanning across the country to give advice. When it comes to careers, the future may never have been so compelling......
21st Century Citizenship, April 2022: Ukraine
As the conflict in Ukraine continues to evolve, it increasingly 'spits bars' from our own history and experience. Cumulatively, its inflections and outcomes may represent turning points in democracy...
21st Century Citizenship, February 2022: Fracture
With Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, an entire era reached forward from the past to prove Faulkner right and push us all backwards and off-balance. Do we still have the collective resolve to mov...
21st Century Citizenship, January 2022: Hope
Optimism has always been integral in our rise to the first rank, if not the pinnacle, of nations. Now would be the worst time in at least eighty years, if not our entire history, to lose it. ...
21st Century Citizenship, October 2021: Taking Stock
As we reach the end of another tumultuous year, it's clearly time for taking stock in advance of even more critical times ahead. Nothing better indicates the urgency of doing so than this recent po...
21st Century Citizenship, August 2021: Interdependence
It's said that in life, we go through three stages: dependence, independence, and interdependence. As a nation, like mid-lifers in crisis, we've been stuck in the second stage for more than 250 years...
21st Century Citizenship, July 2021: Origins
Never in our history have we seemed so lost, so unsure of who we are. Instinctively, like children, we seek to go back to our beginnings. But origins nearly always prove more complex than we expected...
21st Century Citizenship, June 2021: Backwards, Forwards
There are six degrees of separation from the past, not in sequence, but overlapping, like waves: embrace it, reject it, avoid it, ignore it, learn from it, build on it...
21st Century Citizenship, May 2021: Engagement
At a time when mistrust is at its highest levels since the Civil War, we have to work together like we haven't since World War II. New understandings and new forms of engagement are going to be nece...
21st Century Citizenship, April 2021: Party, Faction, Tribe
In his farewell address, Washington was very clear about his top-of-mind fear for our democracy: political parties. And yet it's hard to imagine the progress we've made w/out the Ds and Rs...
21st Century Citizenship, March 2021: Transition
Presidential transitions are normally quiet affairs. This year's, belated to begin with, promises to be long, and touch all aspects of American life as few have seen government so much as attempt...
21st Century Citizenship, February 2021: Best Of 2020
Normally we put this issue out in early January, but this year, 2020 lasted longer than usual, all the way to December 51st. The good news is that even though 2020 seemed to go on forever, it produc...
21st Century Citizenship, January 2021: Post-Mortems & Perspectives
It sounds like such a gloomy way to begin the new year, especially after the gloom-filled epithet of a year preceding. But post-mortems are actually the first green shoots, the beginning of hope...
21st Century Citizenship, November 2020: Prevention
This past month, American democracy had a near-death experience. It's clear that we need to treat not just the symptoms, but the disease, and find ways to prevent it from recurring, but how?...
21st Century Citizenship, October 2020: Rigging
If you think you've seen this movie before, you have. It's not Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, though. It's Donald Trump making baseless claims about the system being rigged...
21st Century Citizenship, September 2020: Small
We yearn for simplicity, we rely on small business for jobs & innovation, technology & globalization provide unprecedented opportunities for the small. And yet everywhere smallness looks to be endang...
21st Century Citizenship, August 2020: Diversity Forever
If George Wallace were alive today, he might well amend his infamous cry. Every part of America is diversifying, and even the birds and bees know it's essential to our future...
21st Century Citizenship, July 2020: Diversity, Division
America has become like the lattices of an apple pie, a nation engaged in much parallel play. Where lattices meet lies both conflict and resolution, the harmony and balance between diversity and divid...
21st Century Citizenship, June 2020: Healing
When the 1918 pandemic, the Great Depression, and the 1960s combine, we're in need of intensive care: healing must come first, before we can recover...
21st Century Citizenship, May 2020: Regression
Regression can be a good thing. In software and statistics it's used to find mistakes; in politics, it's being used to make them...
21st Century Citizenship, April 2020: Pandemic
It's too much to expect, but it's not too much to ask -- Joe Diffie, 1958-2020 Pray for us all. Especially those in ICUs, all alone. And those trying to save them...
21st Century Citizenship, March 2020: Recovery
It may seem like we are in a long national nightmare from which we will never awaken. But that need not be, if we citizens remember that America is the land of second chances, but not straight lines...
21st Century Citizenship, February 2020: India
Last year, we took our February fingertips to the United Kingdom; this year's travelogue landed us in India, the world's largest democracy, struggling with challenges that eerily mirror our own......
21st Century Citizenship, January 2020: Best Of
Out of the tumult of 2019 have emerged many inspiring stories and ideas, which we celebrate with our second annual "best of" edition, recognizing both the posts and stories you, our community, liked b...
21st Century Citizenship, December 2019: Teach/ing
The Latin root of education, educare, means to lead out. In a 'post-truth' world, teachers, the nation's curators and explainers of knowledge, are going to play an outsized role in holding our republ...
21st Century Citizenship, November 2019: Enough
When is enough enough? It's a question we must ask with respect to so many aspects of our lives in these times. In politics today, the query is with us daily, because impeachment is the Constitution's...
21st Century Citizenship, October 2019: Labor
Our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, once observed: "Capital is only the fruit of labor. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." How times have changed--a...
21st Century Citizenship, Sept 2019: Generations
Since his election, the current President and his administration have fractured American democracy and divided its citizenry, most painfully and personally along generational lines. The steps that cit...
21st Century Citizenship, August 2019: Democracy
"It's a republic, not a democracy" say the defenders of minority rule, sliding into authoritarianism. For the founders, and Noah Webster after them, there wasn't remotely as much daylight between t...
21st Century Citizenship, July 2019: Rules
It was an American, General Douglas MacArthur, who coined the phrase "rules are made to be broken." Rule breaking and rule rewriting have been American traditions since the founding of the nation....
21st Century Citizenship, June 2019: Infrastructure
Infrastructure Week has become a running gag, but it's no laughing matter; our infrastructure is not only key to overcoming a surprising array of challenges we face, but may be our best chance to unit...
The bright side of our current political environment is that there has been a renewed focus on civic engagement. In this edition we highlight selected activities in this emerging era of 21st century ...
21st Century Citizenship, Apr 2019: Redistribution
Issues of opportunity, the common good, and government's role in promoting each have been fundamental since the founding of the Republic. How they are addressed and who benefits has not always been ...
21st Century Citizenship, Mar 2019: Techtopia
The Greek root for "-topia" is "topos," which just means "place," as in "topography." As we map the future, whether technology will produce a utopia, a dystopia, or just what a techtopia is genericall...
21st Century Citizenship, Feb 2019: Britannica, Britannia
Great Britain didn't just colonize the US, she gave birth to our nation. We rebelled against her as youngsters, have grown close since, fought beside her, like family, many times. As we hit middle age...
21st Century Citizenship, Jan 2019: Best Of
It's customary for many publications to wrap up the year with "best of" lists of one kind or another. For each of our standard categories, we present the articles that you liked the best--people's cho...
21st Century Citizenship, Dec 2018: Rebuilding
The November elections were like rains in California fire country, or calm blue skies in Florida after a monster tropical depression. When we survive a brush with death in a natural disaster, our tas...
21st Century Citizenship, Nov 2018: Investment
People are saying' we can't tax (or spend) our way out of the challenges ahead of us. They're right. To take on problems that seem so much bigger than we are, we can't just eat the pie, we have to mak...
21st Century Citizenship, Oct 2018: Mid-Terms
Never in our lifetimes has the famous aphorism of early 18th century Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, that 'politics is war by other means,' seemed so apt......
21st Century Citizenship, Sept 2018: Misunderstandings
The 'post-truth' era of 'alternative facts' obscures a deeper reality. That in politics, as in life, it's not what we don't know that's getting us into trouble, it's what we're sure we know that just ...
21st Century Citizenship, July 2018: Less Is More
In our bodies, we have a word and a name for untrammeled growth: cancer. In the body politic, it seems ultimately to lead to dissolution as well......
21st Century Citizenship, June 2018: Arcs
In times like these, moral arcs become a source of comfort. Should they be? We trace these rainbows across the sky of history–individual, social, even biological......
21st Century Citizenship, May 2018: Building Bridges
As it becomes increasingly clear that all of us will have to be accountable for what our leaders will not, we head into a 21st century Freedom Summer that can have no end......
21st Century Citizenship, Apr 2018: Hocus Focus
With all the chaos emanating out of Washington daily, it's hard to know where to turn–but some are managing to ignore the noise and keep their eyes on the prize......
21st Century Citizenship, Mar 2018: And Children Led
The arc of justice seemed to quicken in its pace and pliability this month, in thrall to the high metabolism of the social media generation and their double-edged sword......
21st Century Citizenship, Feb 2018: Starting Young, Starting Old
Looking back on the past month, we're reminded that predicting how history will view events is like playing pool with the balls in constant motion......
21st Century Citizenship: Welcome
Announcing the Frank Islam Institute for 21st Century Citizenship, created to address an increasing civic engagement deficit and enhance the concept of citizenship for the challenges and opportunities...