I have written about Jackie and Shadow before, but the story didn’t remain where I left it. In May, I wrote about a group of fourth graders in Danville, California, who had followed the two bald eagles through a classroom livestream. When the children learned that Moon Camp, nearly 63 acres of undeveloped shoreline within the eagles’ foraging territory, could become a luxury housing development and marina, they began raising money to protect it.
That piece, “The Children Remembered What the Rest of Us Keep Forgetting,” was about hope, about children who hadn’t yet learned to treat helplessness as evidence of sophistication; they cared about two wild creatures, discovered that those creatures’ home was threatened, and reached for whatever was available to them; letters, lemonade, poster board, origami, and adults with wallets. I’m returning to Jackie and Shadow because what once looked like hope has since revealed itself as something more organized, those children were practicing citizenship.
In July, Jackie disappeared from the familiar trees around Big Bear Lake. She was eventually found grounded near Dana Point Park after a brief altercation with two younger eagles. She could defend herself, but she couldn’t fly far enough to reach safety.
Visitors and local residents stayed near her to protect her from wildlife and human interference. They tried to reach agencies, found help through a local fire station, and kept watch while Captain Dennis Jones and his team remained with her until rescuers arrived around two in the morning.
Jackie was transferred first into emergency care and then to the Ojai Raptor Center. According to the latest official update, published July 29, Jackie has been moved out of the intensive care unit and no longer requires oxygen therapy. She remains very sick, continues to receive intensive treatment and monitoring, and isn’t yet out of danger, but the move represents an encouraging step in her recovery. The cause of her severe anemia remains unknown.
Shadow continued defending the territory while Sandy and Luna explored farther from the nest. The young eagles were last seen on camera July 23 and may have begun the normal process of dispersing into lives beyond the range of human observation. As with nearly everything in this story, love has had to coexist with uncertainty.
Jackie’s rescue didn’t happen because one heroic person arrived with every necessary answer; it happened as a relay in which different people noticed, stayed, sought help, exercised institutional authority responsibly, and contributed specialized knowledge, while others donated, shared verified information, and continued paying attention after the dramatic moment had passed. No one person performed the entire rescue; each person accepted responsibility for the next available step. That may be one of the most useful definitions of citizenship we can give a child. A subject waits for power to act, while a citizen learns how to make care travel.
Citizenship is usually taught to children as a collection of symbols and future privileges. There is a flag, a pledge, a handful of powdered-wig men, and the promise that one day they may stand in a small booth and select which adult will disappoint them professionally. The lesson is arranged almost entirely around what the country is, very little around what a citizen does, and even less around what power is attempting to make of them.
That omission has become dangerous. Authoritarian culture doesn’t merely seek control of government; it tries to produce a certain kind of person, obedient to hierarchy, suspicious of difference, loyal to personalities rather than principles, and increasingly convinced that power belongs naturally to whoever already possesses it. It teaches people to experience public life as an audience in which leaders act, institutions bend, and rights disappear while everyone else watches on a screen, selecting only from an approved range of reactions.
A subject may be angry, informed, and capable of spending fourteen hours a day discussing politics in exquisite detail, but what makes someone a subject is not ignorance; it’s the belief that public life is something other people make. A citizen, by contrast, understands that power is a relationship, and that relationships change when people change how they participate in them.
This is the third instruction I want to leave my children, although, as with the first two, I’m writing it partly because the adults need reminding. Hope means understanding that the future is unfinished. Repair means accepting that our choices become part of what happens after we recognize a wound. Citizenship is how those choices find one another and become more powerful than any of us could be alone.
The difference between a citizen and a subject begins much earlier than the voting booth; it begins in the first rooms where children encounter authority. Children are born into a world governed almost entirely by people larger than they are, where adults determine when they sleep, what they eat, where they go, what they wear, which objects may enter their mouths, and whether the fascinating electrical opening in the wall is available for independent exploration.
Some of this authority is necessary because children possess limited judgment and a nearly supernatural ability to locate hazards inside ordinary furniture. Parenting can’t be conducted as a direct democracy; we would never reach bedtime, vegetables would lose representation entirely, and my daughter would likely redirect a significant portion of the household budget toward ballet attire.
Still, there is an enormous difference between teaching a child that some authority is necessary and teaching a child that authority is therefore always right. A subject is trained to obey the person above them, while a citizen is taught to understand the purpose and limits of authority. A subject learns that questioning a rule is disrespectful, whereas a citizen learns that rules require reasons, that power carries obligations, and that no person becomes infallible simply because they control the snacks.
This means our children need to hear us explain why, even when the answer remains no. They need to see adults apologize without collapsing into a decorative pile of lost authority. They need to know that a parent, teacher, police officer, president, pastor, employer, or beloved public figure can be wrong, and that recognizing the wrong doesn’t make the child disloyal; it makes the child awake.
Authoritarianism depends upon the deliberate confusion of loyalty with goodness. It asks people to prove their virtue by defending the leader, the party, the nation, or the institution even when those things have betrayed the principles they were supposed to serve. The performance of allegiance becomes more important than the object of allegiance. A flag is treated as sacred while the people beneath it are made disposable. We can’t prepare children for that culture by teaching them that goodness means compliance.
This doesn’t mean raising children who refuse every instruction as a matter of revolutionary principle. A child who is running toward traffic doesn’t require a seminar on participatory governance. It means distinguishing between immediate obedience for safety and permanent obedience as a moral identity. It means teaching them that respect doesn’t require surrendering perception, conscience, or the right to ask what a rule is for.
Children already possess the beginnings of this instinct. They are exquisitely alert to unfairness, particularly when fairness concerns the distribution of desserts, screen time, or maternal attention. Their analysis is sometimes self-serving and their diplomatic language occasionally includes screaming from beneath a blanket, but the underlying question remains: Why does one person get to decide what happens to another? That question is the beginning of political thought.
Too often, adults spend childhood sanding it down. We reward quiet agreement, call persistent questions defiance, and confuse a manageable child with a morally developed one. Then we’re surprised when grown people obey harmful orders, defer to confident liars, or wait for permission to defend someone being mistreated.
The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate a child’s instinct to challenge power; the goal is instead to give that instinct ethics, discipline, knowledge, and company. I think the practice of citizenship can be taught through five verbs: notice, ask, join, act, and remain.
First, we teach children to notice. Authoritarian power benefits from narrowed attention. It tells us to look at the spectacle instead of the structure, the threatening stranger instead of the official creating the threat, the individual failure instead of the system engineered to produce it. To notice as a citizen is to look beyond what is being announced and ask what is happening to actual lives.
Children can learn to notice who is missing, who is carrying the burden, whose version of events is treated as credible, what has changed in the river, why the library has fewer hours, or why one neighborhood has sidewalks and another has been waiting for them since approximately the invention of pavement. They can be taught that public conditions are not just that; someone made choices, someone benefited, and someone else can make different choices.
Then we teach them to ask. Who decided this? What reason did they give? Who gains from it? Who pays for it? Who was consulted? What evidence would change our minds? Does the rule apply to the powerful in the same way it applies to everyone else?
These aren’t merely questions for government; they’re a defense against manipulation in every institution a child will enter. A person who can ask how a decision was made is harder to rule through inevitability, and a person who understands that authority must explain itself is less likely to mistake confidence for legitimacy.
We should also allow children to ask those questions of us, that’s the portion adults tend to find less inspiring. It’s relatively easy to tell children to question power when power is located in Washington, D.C., wearing a suit we dislike. It becomes more difficult when power is standing at the kitchen counter trying to finish an email while a four-year-old conducts a hostile oversight hearing into the unequal distribution of blue cups.
Yet democracy can’t be taught entirely through the examination of other people’s authority. Children learn what accountable power looks like by watching what we do with the power we possess. If we demand honesty but lie when honesty inconveniences us, insist upon respect while humiliating them, or treat every disagreement as disobedience, the lesson will be clearer than anything we say about the Constitution.
After asking, they must learn to join. Authoritarianism isolates people before it organizes them. It teaches each person to experience fear privately, solve public failures individually, and regard other struggling people as competitors for whatever remains. A lonely population can be furious without becoming powerful. Citizenship begins when private concern becomes shared purpose.
When I first wrote about the children in Danville, I focused on their refusal to become embarrassed by caring. They made that care portable beyond the classroom. A feeling inside one classroom became letters sent into other homes, signs carried through public streets, money collected from strangers, and a campaign that could gather people who had never met one another around a shared purpose.
Caring didn’t make them citizens by itself, because plenty of people care privately about things they have already accepted will be destroyed; citizenship began when their care entered the public world and asked other people to participate. That’s what joining changes; it turns “I wish someone would” into “Who can we bring with us?”
Children need places where they can practice that discovery. It may be a classroom project, a neighborhood cleanup, a library campaign, a food drive, a school board meeting, habitat restoration, helping a family in crisis, or organizing around something adults have dismissed as too small to matter. The specific project matters less than the experience of moving from “I care” to “we can.”
Then they must act. To act is to accept that concern must eventually cost us something, whether the cost is time, effort, money, comfort, attention, or the safety of remaining silent. Joining creates shared purpose; acting asks what we’re prepared to contribute to it.
We should let children see us participate in public life beyond voting, and beyond shouting accurately at the television. They can watch us write a letter, attend a meeting, call an office, help a neighbor, support striking workers, testify, volunteer, donate, organize, document, protest, or refuse cooperation with cruelty. They should see that citizenship is not a personality type reserved for extroverts with clipboards. It is the practice of bringing whatever power, skill, time, voice, or attention we possess into a shared problem.
The screen can be a doorway into that practice, but it can’t be its permanent address. Watching politics is not the same as participating in it. Knowing every terrible thing that happened today may leave us more informed, but it doesn’t necessarily leave the world more defended. An authoritarian culture is perfectly willing to let people consume endless content about their own powerlessness. Outrage becomes another subscription service, and the subject remains exactly where power prefers them: watching.
Finally, children must learn to remain public. Life is full of beginnings. There are launches, marches, viral posts, emergency meetings, and bursts of attention so bright they briefly make change seem inevitable. Then the cameras move, the vote is delayed, the first plan fails, the exciting volunteer job becomes data entry, and everyone discovers that democracy contains an alarming quantity of folding chairs. Citizenship requires staying after the emotion changes.
To remain means accepting that we won’t always win, that allies will occasionally be annoying, that compromise can be necessary without making every compromise wise, and that losing one decision doesn’t release us from the public world. It means returning to institutions we want to improve rather than treating disappointment as proof that participation was foolish.
This is where citizenship differs most sharply from performed loyalty. Loyalty asks us to remain devoted to a person regardless of what they do. Citizenship asks us to remain devoted to principles and people, which may require opposing the person in charge. It also asks us to recognize those unlike us as co-owners of the public world.
A democracy isn’t simply majority rule. If fifty-one percent of the family votes to sell the remaining forty-nine percent to a private equity firm, we have held an election but haven’t produced justice. Citizenship requires an understanding that rights don’t become optional when their holders are unpopular, unfamiliar, politically inconvenient, or unavailable for a cable news interview.
Children should learn that their country isn’t a private club inherited by the most powerful members. Their neighbors don’t have to earn the right to belong by resembling them, worshipping as they do, loving whom they approve of, speaking the same language, or performing gratitude for rights that were never supposed to be favors. A subject asks whether the ruler approves of a person, a citizen asks whether the person is free.
This kind of education can’t be outsourced to a civics textbook, particularly when the textbook is busy describing democracy as an accomplished fact rather than a living arrangement that can be neglected, captured, or destroyed. Children learn citizenship from the moral atmosphere around them. They learn it from whether adults tell the truth when their own side lies, whether we protect rights only when we like the person using them, whether we make room for dissent, and whether our concern becomes action once the post has been shared.
Since I first wrote about the children in Danville, the campaign to protect Moon Camp has reached its $10 million goal. Thousands of supporters raised nearly half of the amount before Anna and Greg Brockman contributed more than $5.5 million, completing the campaign and clearing the way for the property to be purchased and preserved.
Moon Camp will be protected, and although Jackie remains very sick, her condition has improved enough for her to leave intensive care. One outcome changed because people entered the work together, while another remains beyond their control. That isn’t a contradiction in citizenship, it’s the condition under which citizenship is practiced.
The children didn’t personally raise $10 million through the raw economic force of powdered drink mix and folded paper. They did something citizenship requires before any large victory becomes possible: they made care public. They carried affection out of a classroom and into streets, homes, inboxes, and conversations where other people could join it.
Children, visitors, residents, first responders, wildlife rescuers, specialists, and donors each accepted the next available part of the work. No one could do everything, but each person refused to do nothing. That’s the third instruction I want to leave my children. Notice what’s happening, ask who holds power, find those already working, contribute what you can, and stay engaged after the initial emotion fades.
We should be careful, because children aren’t an emergency reserve of moral courage for adults who have exhausted their own. They shouldn’t have to save the eagles, the climate, the schools, the libraries, the social safety net, or constitutional government while the people responsible offer encouraging remarks from a golf cart.
Raising citizens doesn’t mean handing children the wreckage and calling it empowerment; it means refusing to train power out of them before they’re old enough to use it. It means giving them truth in forms they can carry, responsibility proportionate to their capacity, and repeated evidence that ordinary people can enter public life together. It means teaching them that authority is not destiny, dissent is not betrayal, losing is not the same as being powerless, and no leader deserves the portion of their conscience reserved for deciding what’s right.
The first instruction in this series was to teach hope in a dying democracy. The second was to repair what we didn’t break without allowing responsibility to become self-erasure. This instruction follows both: find other people, bring what you can, and enter the unfinished world together.
I don’t want my children to grow up believing that citizenship is a document they possess, a box they check, or a drama performed by important people on a screen. I want them to understand it as a relationship with everyone who shares the consequences of public decisions, including people they will never meet and creatures who can’t petition on their own behalf.
Freedom isn’t proved by having no obligations to one another. Freedom is made possible by people willing to protect the conditions in which everyone can speak, question, belong, and act. A subject watches and waits, a citizen notices what needs to happen next, finds other people, and begins.
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Shanley, you write so well. This was a particularly well written piece. We all can learn from this and we can hope that we enough of us care that we can turn things around for our grand children. I thank you!
Hey Shanley, you brought tears to my eye! I taught art in Alb. NM for 20 yrs, I loved every minute! We learned a lot about clay and teenagers! I had the Special kids mixed in w regular students all day. They made friends, ate lunch together and a few went to prom together! That was the Bomb!
Your writing blows me away! Have fun with your kudos they grow up soo fast!