(Editor’s note: This is the 6th of 10 articles serializing Executive Editor Michael Ryan’s ebook YouRule: How Saving America Depends Entirely on You And What You Can Do About It.)
OK, come on. What is our “civic infrastructure” anyway?
Since you’re running this country, I’m really glad you asked that.
Have you ever seen a highway or building under construction and noticed the steel reinforcing it from within? Our largely unseen civic infrastructure works like that. It’s the steel girder that both abuts and abets our interactions, and fortifies a free and civil society; it helps prevent the kind of corrosion described above and keeps civil society from crumbling.
There are Five Pillars of Our Civic Infrastructure:
- A knowledge and appreciation of our system of self-governance
- An informed and involved citizenry
- Service clubs and other civic-minded organizations
- A shared sense of spirituality and brotherhood
- Strong families
Reinforcing society with such “social rebar” isn’t rocket science—it’s social science. It’s all about how we act, react and interact. Therefore, running this country is not something you can leave to someone else. We need everyone of good intent to get in the governing game. And that means you.
Remember the fancifully titled James Bond movie You Only Live Twice? It was obviously meant to be ironic, and (spoiler alert) refers to our favorite secret agent feigning his own death. But the truth is you do live twice, in a sense—both at once. You have a private life and a public life.
Your private life is, of course, all about you, your family and friends, your occupations and avocations. Your public life is about everything and everyone else: Your community, state, nation and world; the issues you chime in on or pitch in on; the organizations and causes you choose to further; the strangers you meet—and even those you don’t, in the case of the missionary you help support halfway across the globe.
Can there be any doubt that, as a people, we’ve overindulged our private lives? Might our waistlines be one measurement of it? Google the term “signs of overindulgence” and you’ll find a bona fide buffet of advice on how to ease the effects of gastric overindulgence. There’s also sage advice on how to avoid overindulging your child. The South China Morning Post assures us that “Overindulgence can be an issue for pets, too.” Good grief.
If only we were gluttons in our public lives! We’d overstuff the town hall or city council meeting; move our civic club from the banquet room to the auditorium; supply the Red Cross like it was the Red Army; hold our leaders at least as accountable as the IRS holds us; and maybe set the stage for world peace or cure a disease or two before dinner.
Not that there aren’t already gluttons for benevolence. We’ve all known those amazing people in the community who just can’t push themselves back from the activism table. Helping after helping after helping. We could use more like them.
All Right Then, Where Do We Start?
Easy. You have to start with you.
I learned that for myself a few years ago when my apprehension for America’s future turned to alarm, and I sat down to write what I fancied as a self-help booklet for the country. It became the pocket-sized What You Can Do For Your Country (which, again, I’ve shared at the end of YouRule!). Though it’s just a list of everyday things everybody can do to strengthen America, I was swept away by the hunger that greeted its publication: I found that people were as worried about the country as I was, and were starving for the modest tidbits of hope and guidance I’d laid out.
But I was even more astounded by the process of writing it. Due to my politically laden experience as a newspaper editorial writer, I expected at the outset that the book would be something of an ideological manifesto. How wrong I was. When I finally put down the keyboard, I’d largely written a self-help book for individuals, with an eye toward citizenship.
It was an epiphany, though in retrospect it shouldn’t have been: Logic tells you the health of a self-governed nation is a direct result of the vitality and virtue of its citizens. As John Adams noted, our Constitution, and by extension our nation, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Health, vitality and virtue require the setting of priorities—and in What You Can Do For Your Country, I suggested these should be our priorities: God, family, country, community and self—the concentric circles in which we live our lives and, I maintain, their order of importance.
The list of things I came up with for what you can do for your country range from the bold—running for office—to the routine—flossing, for instance, which is a fundamental act of self-care so crucial to the whole of society. Again, it’s not astrophysics. It turns out America runs on little more than the combined character, brotherhood and citizenship of we, the people.
More specifically, there are five tools needed to repair America’s neglected civic infrastructure. They are the Five Cs:
- Civics
- Citizenship
- Civility
- Constitution
- Character
Next: Before setting to work on fixing our civic infrastructure, let’s first get a handle on those tools, the Five Cs of civic construction.
About the Author
Michael F. Ryan is executive editor of The Heartlander, as well as a longtime newspaper journalist and editorial writer, frequent speaker, and author of the international novel The Last Freedom on Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.
His award-winning work has appeared in newspapers and magazines since the 1980s, as he has made a decades-long study of civic engagement and its decline.
The full YouRule! ebook is available for 99 cents at either BookBaby or Amazon.
