Statements of absolute fact:  

(Participation Cards Please)

• It is much harder to be a good citizen than it is a good person. 

• Citizenship carries with it duties and obligations not easily maintained without practice.

• Ordinary means “with no remarkable or unique features”.  Reminder from Module 1. That is not us. 

• According to natural law, each of us has the capability to be remarkable, in almost every way.

• Any system which seeks to organize a complex society is dependent upon the temperament and enlightenment of the people themselves.

• If you want to live deep in the remote woods somewhere alone, “ordinary” will do just fine, but as people who interact in a large and diverse environment it requires that we move beyond our ordinary, it requires that we be remarkable.

The smaller the group the smaller the problems, the larger the group the larger the problems.  National politics is the hardest thing we do together;if we could appreciate the complexity, we would choose to prepare citizens to be up for the challenge. 

Discuss how and why we often slip into ordinary mode, explain that it's ok. To take temporary time outs from being good, but explore what these moments look like in public, and what these temporary emotional outbursts do to our perception of our politicians and fellow Americans. 

Staying emotionally and physically well ourselves is a challenge. On top of this, we are each being asked to be good citizens which is very hard. 

Teachers discuss the differences between ordinary and remarkable here: 

Quotations to discuss: 

“What the superior man seeks is in himself. What the ordinary man seeks is in others”. Confucius

“The Constitution and the men who created it put these unimaginably great and fragile things in the hands of the people. So these things - still unimaginably great and fragile- are in our hands now, this minute…” Metaxas p11)

“In a Republic, … each man must somehow be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the whole.” (50)  

“[The Founders] knew that without … [virtue and morality] … the Constitution they had written and the republican system of government which it provided could not be maintained.” (54)

“We are inescapably exceptional and therefore inescapably burdened with the responsibility to help others.” (Metaxas, P193)   

“each of us who call ourselves Americans has a great duty to keep [the promise of freedom and democracy] – and if we don’t do our duty toward keeping that promise, our nation will soon cease to exist in any real sense.” (3) 

“America would not flourish without great help from all Americans. That was the only way it would work and the only way it could work … The ordered liberties and how they were to work together required a citizenry devoted to keeping them in order” (4)

Resources: If you can keep it Metaxas  what is required of citizenship in the words of 18th century Americans and founding members who formed the country after 80 years of learning and development of enlightenment period values.   

5000 Year Leap, established in non political, bipartisan, non religious, humble, and balanced way the intentions of the founding fathers, and the frameworks, and reasoning upon with our first laws were established. 

***** Handout for Homework or At Home Reading: 

When we are attached to our higher gifts we understand that we have an impact on those around us, and we care about the impact that we make. The opposite is true when we become detached. Without daily observance we unknowingly contribute to a decaying society- it's that hard!  the danger zone, the careless zone, the masculine zone, the uncaring zone, in our robotic, careless, unenlightened modes of awareness, we think we are smarter than we are, we develop blind servitude to our own opinions, we become fearful and we cannot overcome the many challenges that life throws at us. In our ordinary state, we hire ordinary people to lead us, and we don't see the harm in “ordinary”. Ordinary leaders are not capable of uniting people because they are no longer remarkable people, they therefore do not attend to virtue, they do not attend to the common good, they are not humble, and not balanced.  These things keep us trapped in our unenlightened and unintended, unremarkable state of being. To pull this off, to make it all work it will require a commitment by everyone in our society far greater than we’ve been making.