A word of caution is in order. Because real political decision-making often follows serpentine paths and because elected officials often attempt to limit their responsibility for unpleasant events, the young child might quickly become disillusioned if expecting quick and sensible results. Because politics is necessarily the business of compromise, we must find ways to show our children a thread of progress running through what might often appear to be the theater of the absurd. To see this thread, one might need to climb with the child to the crow's nest mentioned earlier in this book to gain the long view, to win the perspective to see how the pieces of this particular puzzle fit together to make a sensible picture. A school budget defeat may seem to be a disaster as it is happening, but it might just mobilize enough previously passive and uninvolved citizens to establish the basis for a decade of forward movement and progress.
Citizenship often requires a tolerance for ambiguity and outcomes which fall far short of ideals.
Making up one's political mind may require some bending and twisting of the puzzle pieces. Perhaps that is why so many citizens stay home and avoid the polls. Perhaps the best armor against disillusionment is fore-warning. Parents who raise children with fanciful notions of how politics work are likely to see their children respond to reality latter in life with bitterness, cynicism and apathy. Children raised on the pieties of the 1950s often turned off and tuned out when facing the difficult decades of the 1960s and 1970s.