Education Quote by Emmylou Harris

Harris frames civic decline in the plain language of someone who’s spent a lifetime watching audiences and industries change: the problem isn’t disagreement, it’s performance. The image of “grown people screaming at each other” isn’t just a gripe about cable news volume; it’s a verdict on how public life has been remade into a genre where outrage is the hook and listening is dead air. By emphasizing “grown people,” she punctures the supposed seriousness of pundit culture, recasting it as childish spectacle with real stakes.

Her insistence on being “more thoughtful and more educated and more informed” reads like a quiet rebuttal to the idea that democracy runs on vibes. The repetition is doing work: it’s a three-part drumbeat against passivity, a reminder that citizenship is a practice, not a demographic. Coming from a musician - someone associated with feeling, authenticity, and storytelling - the call for information lands with a particular bite. She’s not rejecting emotion; she’s arguing that emotion without literacy is easily weaponized.

The subtext is generational and distinctly American: a fear that we’ve replaced the hard, boring work of self-government with a culture war talent show. “If we don’t get our civility back” suggests civility as something stolen, not naturally eroded - an asset that can be recovered through collective discipline. The closing “we’re in trouble” is intentionally unspecific, letting listeners fill in the consequences: cynicism, authoritarian drift, or simply a country that can no longer share reality long enough to fix anything.