The focus of Katy J. Harriger's opinion piece in the Philanthropy Journal should not be overlooked; nonprofits and the philanthropic community are hurt when government and citizens are not engaged in politics. This makes government less responsible and in addition to various other reasons, the public sector becomes weakened which there by hurts the nonprofit sector. As we all learned in class, a three-legged stool is used to represent the relationship between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors and therefore each must be equally strong. I don't have room to document all the reasons our political system has become so ineffective, but I would argue that citizen disengagement is part of the explanation, and that disengagement is in turn caused by a combination of factors like the role of money in campaigns, the generally poor coverage of the political process by the media, especially television, the gerrymandering of electoral districts, the bitter partisanship that divides us, and the decline of serious civic education in the schools.