The following blog post was written by Frank Santarpia, Senior Adviser to the Borough President.

When Borough President Oddo asked me to help develop content for a new tab on our website that was to be called “​The Civics Corner,” I savored the assignment as much as any I’ve had since I entered public service.  That’s how much I love the topic, and bemoan the widespread lack of knowledge about civics and government.  For many who think as I do, it isn’t hyperbolic to say this ignorance constitutes a slowly-metastasizing crisis that could become – if it is not already – a crippling blow to good governance.

At the “Civics Corner” you will find articles, whiteboards, links to websites and TED Talks – pretty much anything and everything we can find to address the subject.

For too many New Yorkers, mention of the word “civics” will elicit a yawn.  In most cases, those legions of the disinterested either think they have a firm grip on the topic (they don’t), think it’s not an important subject (it is), or think it really has no impact on their lives (it does).

Let’s start by defining it: the study of civics teaches us our rights as citizens, as well as our duties to other citizens and to our government.  And it provides us with a much-needed understanding of how government works.

For much of our nation’s history civics had been taught in American schools - it was considered an obligation and a necessity, our solemn responsibility to train successive generations about what it means to be a good citizen and what it means to be an American.  Today, sadly, civics learning has taken a back seat to other subjects; an old adage in education being “if it is tested, it is taught.”

Civics is not being tested, and in our schools, civics is not being taught.  Not to the extent it should be, anyway.

While no one is denying the importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), particularly here at Borough Hall where those subjects are venerated, there is no denying that they are crowding out civics education.  The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, a basic knowledge of our three branches of government and how they work together - none of this is being taught in depth, if it is being taught at all.

More than half of all Americans tested in a survey by City Journal couldn’t name the three branches of government.  More than two-thirds couldn’t identify when the Civil War was fought within fifty years!

How can the next generation of leaders even qualify to be called “leaders” if they lack a rudimentary grasp of how our country works, and more importantly, have little understanding of how our nation came to be, are ignorant of the ideals and beliefs that molded it, and are unaware of the philosophies and schools of thought that shaped our values and our culture?

So our Civics Corner is but one small attempt to get folks to pay some attention to the issue.  Will we replace a robust high school civics class?  Absolutely not – nor is that the intent.  We just want to raise awareness a little bit, to address topics that affect us on the most local of levels and to provide links to various websites, lectures and workshops.  There are informative whiteboards on a variety of topics and more are being added every month.  And we’re proud to mention that we’ve recently convinced the Department of Education to begin training all Staten Island social studies teachers who wish to offer their students a digital learning resource called iCivics.  The announcement was made at (where else?) one of our top-rated schools: The School for Civic Leadership in Graniteville.

The words of Sandra Day O’Connor, the driving force behind iCivics, are perhaps the most fitting way to end this piece:  “The practice of democracy is not passed down through the gene pool.  It must be taught and learned anew by each generation of citizens…”

​The following blog post was written by Frank Santarpia, Senior Adviser to the Borough President.

My father was a veteran.  That’s a simple statement, but I freely admit it took me a long time, and a lot of growing up, to fully appreciate what that meant.  What it meant to our country, what it meant to our family, what it meant to my father, and in the end, what it meant to me.

Frank Peter Santarpia, born in 1925, son of Italian immigrants, believed in the greatness of America.  So did every man who fought beside him on that rock; so does every man who proudly calls himself a veteran today.  It is the job of those who did not serve in the armed forces -- and I did not -- to make sure that those who did are recognized, celebrated, and most importantly, thanked.

And that is the importance of Veteran’s Day, it sharpens our focus, and that is why I want to tell my father’s story.  Not because it was remarkable, but because for the American military, it was so very typical.

Easter Sunday came early in 1945, and many of the tens of thousands of Marines waiting nervously in troop transports a few thousand yards off the beaches of the Ryukyu Islands must have feared that this day's celebration of the Resurrection would be their last.  Others would note with irony that it was the first of April: April Fool's Day.  All of them, however, were blanketed by that one inescapable, overarching reality -- their lives might end before the sun dipped below the far western fringes of the Pacific Ocean.

Shortly before dawn, the first wave of United State Marines would slip over the sides of their troop transports, climbing down rope netting into the rocking landing craft below known as Higgins Boats.  The codename for the operation was Iceberg.  The invasion of Okinawa had begun.

My father enlisted in the Marine Corp on the day he turned 18 in 1943, and after a year of stateside training, he was shipped overseas.  On Guam and Iwo Jima, he trained for amphibious landings.  By that time, the United States Navy and Marine Corp had island-hopped almost all the way across the Pacific -- almost.  There was but a single island to capture, an island that would serve as an important forward base in what everyone believed was inevitable: the invasion of the Japanese homeland.  That one island was Okinawa.

PFC Frank Santarpia, 3rd Platoon, I Company, 3rd Battalion, 29th Regiment, 6th Marine Division, twenty years old, went ashore with the first wave in the gray dawn of that April morning.

There's not the time or space to recount here the gruesome details of the ensuing battle, but let it be noted that Okinawa was the most heavily defended island of the war.  By the time it was secure, 12,513 young American men were dead.  So, too, were the commanding generals of both the American and Japanese forces.  The wounded numbered 38,916, and my father was one of them; he was shot on May 16, during the battle for a cursed mound of earth the Marines nicknamed Sugar Loaf Hill.  

He received a Purple Heart, spent three weeks in a makeshift island hospital, and was sent back to his platoon before the operation was completed.  His regiment, the 29th, had been thrown into a meat grinder: their casualty rate was over 90%.  Within the 22nd and 29th, the two regiments that finally secured the hill on the 18th of May, two of every three men fell.

As I said earlier, despite his remarkable courage my father's compelling story was far from unique – when I asked him, he would tell me that he was simply doing his job alongside tens of thousands of other Marines and soldiers.  In the same way as any other American fighting for freedom, past and present, his actions represented the norm, not the exception -- and to the day he died, any and every detail about that battle had to be coaxed from him.  He never talked about it voluntarily, and he never thought he did anything special.  

He was just a scared kid from Brooklyn.

Veteran’s Day is upon us, America, and it is time to start remembering.  It is time for us to perform a service for our country.  Maybe that service is simply telling our children or grandchildren about things that perhaps their schoolbooks never will.  Maybe we should tell them about war and tyranny and the great men and women who stood ready, stand ready to this day, to keep us safe.  

And I know that until I draw my last breath I will never forget, and when my grandchildren are old enough I will tell the story of those who fought and died for our flag and our freedom, and one in particular who took a bullet  on a Godforsaken piece of volcanic rock that was six thousand miles closer to Tokyo than it was to Ebbets Field.

We must tell them what it means to be a veteran, and why we owe them so very much.  Because if we don't tell them, nobody will.