Not if you know what you are doing, and the people who know what they are doing in a democracy are the true citizens among us. Not true citizens because they have rights, but true citizens because they have accepted responsibility.

True in the sense of fidelity, of faithfulness.

True citizenship is the application of intelligence, skills, and affection. It requires the same attention to detail that is demanded by other roles we accept quite easily.

As parents, most of us have more than one child. At some point, maybe several times a day, a parent is presented with dispute. To get to the bottom of it a parent must sift through several versions of the same event. Good parents – true parents -- approach these conflicts with a certain kind of intelligence and experience, trying to hook various explanations around some kind of reality.

A parent negotiates these competing versions in order to make a judgment and do justice.

In other words, parents do what they do, when they do it right, through wisdom that is also a kind of love. This is the kind of love that requires faith in the whole idea of family.

That’s what citizens do. When we do it right, we do it with love for each other and for our country. We do it with faith in democracy itself.

Jury duty is another example.

In a trial we expect that each side will tell jurors some version of the truth, playing up the parts that cast a favorable light, and playing down the parts that don’t look so good. We expect it because we have a system of justice that assumes competent citizens can listen to competing versions of the truth and then go off in a room together and figure out what really happened, and whether punishment should be imposed. Not a decision that makes everybody happy, but one that is faithful to the purpose of justice.

That is what true citizens do. They listen to their political representatives and to each other, and then they reach a decision that is faithful to the purpose of democracy.

It’s not complicated, but it’s not easy either. It’s simple to understand, and difficult to do right.

We expect that jurors and parents will take their jobs seriously. We have laws against negligence of duty in these areas.

So why are our expectations of citizenship so low?

In this country you can get a welfare check or a government contract without being registered to vote.

To say that such low expectations foster true citizenship is like saying that parents are effective if they just feed the baby and change her diapers.

We expect jurors to pay attention to the evidence and deliberate before they jump to a conclusion. So why can’t we expect that we will all participate attentively in public life?

What we are finding out, at a horribly high price for the insight, is that thinking democracy will work while maintaining low expectations of citizenship is like waiting for a miracle.

In the 21st century we are going to have to do more than hope for a miracle. We are going to have to learn how to do the job, and we are going to have to hold each other accountable.

We are going to have to expect true citizenship.