A few weeks ago, sixty-seven (67) people were killed in the District of Colombia (D.C.) in a collision between a military helicopter and an airliner.

It also turns out that federal regulators of our air space knew that there was significant danger of collision over the District of Colombia.

It also turns out that D.C. airspace is full of helicopters, military and civilian both. So here we are. Nearly seventy peoples’ lives were ended by this collision, some of them very accomplished people and perhaps good citizens. Is it too much to feel the wrongness of their ending their lives early because of an avoidable mid-air collision? We have no reason to think that they were anything but good citizens.

There’s the key: good citizens. It turns out that, over the last generation, about half of the American citizens who could vote did indeed vote. The percentages of those who are registered and vote varies over the past generation. Generally, a little more than half have voted, but only one or other time did as many as seven of ten registered voters actually vote.

It also turns out that to function, a democracy needs considerably more than half of its citizens informed about their leaders, alert to affairs, and caring enough to inform themselves and go vote when the democratic form of government–that’s the form we have, and it has been functioning through two and a half turbulent centuries now—anyhow, the democratic form of government demands that citizens are appreciative enough and serious enough to go vote.

And we didn’t really go vote and look what is happening now.