If democracy seems to work, and if people receive a consistent, reliable, and meaningful response from others when they communicate their opinions an… - Al Gore

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If democracy seems to work, and if people receive a consistent, reliable, and meaningful response from others when they communicate their opinions and feelings about shared experiences, they begin to assume that self-expression in democracy matters. When they can communicate with others regularly, in ways that produce meaningful changes, they learn that democracy matters. If they receive responses that seem to be substantive but actually are not, citizens begin to feel as if they were being manipulated. If the messages they receive from the media feed this growing cynicism, the decline of democracy can be accelerated. Moreover, if citizens of a country express their opinions and feelings over an extended period of time without evoking a meaningful response, then they naturally begin to feel angry. If the flow of communication provides little opportunity for citizens to express themselves meaningfully, they naturally begin to feel frustration and powerlessness. This has happened all too often to minority communities who suffer prejudice and are not given a fair hearing by the majority for complaints. My generation learned in our youth to expect that democracy would work. Our frustration with the ineptitude and moral insensitivity of our national leaders in the last several years is balanced by the knowledge we gained in an earlier time and is influenced by the basic posture we adopted during our first experiences as citizens. Although many in my generation became disillusioned with self-government, most of us still believe that democracy works — or can work — and that communication and participation are the keys to making it work well. In the United States of America, the torch of democracy — to use John F. Kennedy’s metaphor — is regularly passed from one generation to the next. But what happens if the torch is passed to a generation that has learned to adopt a different posture toward democracy and to assume that their opinions are not likely to evoke an appropriat