"I think the hardest thing for young people is that they are so disengaged from everything. They have seen everything in their mind fail, and they are so used to people doing things for them and wanting them and trying to get them that they sort of go, 'Well, if it is that important to you that I vote, why don't you let me do it on the Internet? If it is that important to you that I vote, why do I have to go through this whole process where I wait for 3 hours to go in'... One of the most telling things was a college student saying he didn't read the paper because, if the news is that important, it will find him, and you sort of go, that's a horrible attitude, but you also realize he's right. You know what, it will come on someone's BlackBerry. Someone is going to call someone on the cell phone. So they don't have to actively pursue anything because, in their mind, everything has actively pursued them.

"So, same thing with civic engagement, if it is that important, why aren't you making it mandatory in my school? If it is that important, why aren't we like Israel where we have 2 years demanded service?

"So there is this sort of backward, 'Well, if you don't make it important in my life, then I am not going to make it important in my life.'"

"If you approach citizenship as something to be found rather than something to be generated and created, I think you would begin to have a very different result. You would find a lot more citizenship, civic engagement, than you anticipated if you had an open mind about what that is and the forms that it takes, and you would then be better able to encourage it by small incremental steps rather than the grand scheme for launching a new initiative to engage people in public affairs."

"I think this generation could end up breaking all records when it comes to finding new ways to serve others, both in the definition of the traditional 'service' definition and then new ways of political engagement where people stay informed differently and they are more organized around issues.

"I mean, in many ways, our society has increasingly moved in that direction anyway, but as you say, there is a lot of cynicism that has grown up around that because what has happened with interest groups is they become so focused on their own goal that they are blinded to everything else. What I would hope for young people is that they could find a way to both accurately lobby for and argue for what they believe, but understand that societies don't move forwards with 100 small groups all fighting for 100 different things, but with people who are willing to work together. That is obviously what we haven't had a whole lot of in the last few years."

"I don't think people are thinking of themselves as citizens that much anymore, and I think it's got more to do with the failure of institutions, political parties, officer-holders do to treat people like they're citizens. So I think it is more consumer - they're treated, you know, more as consumers. Even the politics has become transactional. It's, you, know, 'I'll give you a tax cut for your vote,' 'Well, we'll give you free health care for your vote,' and it's all transactional. There is no call to citizenship for the common good.

"But I think people hunger for that. My own view is that I run into people, and in my work, I get a sense that there is a deep hunger for a call to the common good and a deep hunger to be treated as a citizen, to be a citizen, but there's no place to perform your citizenship, and that's where I think a lot of the institutions are failing."