Politics & Power Quote by Roger Ebert

Ebert’s line lands like a shrug with a sting: not a melodramatic “kids these days,” but a weary diagnosis from someone who spent his life watching America narrate itself on screen. The phrasing matters. “I begin to feel” is the sound of resignation creeping in, the moment when an observation hardens into a conclusion you didn’t want to reach. And “the last generation” is deliberately apocalyptic, less demographic claim than moral mood.

The specific intent is to frame civic ignorance as a cultural rupture, not just an educational gap. Civics class isn’t nostalgia for worksheets; it’s shorthand for a shared operating system: how a bill becomes a law, what checks and balances are for, what rights actually mean when they collide with power. Ebert’s subtext is that public life has become legible mainly as spectacle. If you don’t understand the machinery, you judge outcomes like movie endings: satisfying, enraging, “plot holes,” villains. That’s critic brain turned outward, using narrative language to describe political literacy.

Context matters because Ebert wasn’t a pundit by trade; he was a mass-audience intellectual. When he laments civics, he’s also lamenting the erosion of common reference points that once made argument possible. The bite is that he doesn’t claim superiority outright. He claims disorientation: he feels like a survivor of a vanished curriculum. The line works because it suggests the quiet terror underneath contemporary politics: not that we disagree, but that we don’t even share the map.