I can’t blame you for not wanting to go to the informational meetings and open forums put on by our local governments and schools; I’ve had more fun in hospital waiting rooms.

But what happens when nobody shows up is that a tiny handful of people get to make all of the decisions. And then we get angry when the tiny handful don’t make the decisions that we like. The consequences of some decisions aren’t fully revealed until many years later, and we’re left to blame the bad decisions on a lack of foresight. Except now we’re five years behind.

Besides wanting to avoid the crushing boredom of these meetings, our best excuse is, “I’m just too busy.” Which is true; everyone is busy. People with kids (like me) are especially busy, so much so that when we meet people without kids who state how busy THEY are, we just laugh. You haven’t known busy until you have several short people running underfoot with their own busy agendas.

But some of us are not quite busy enough, so we’ve added small electronics to fill even those few minutes of downtime. We need to maintain that contain high-level buzz of busyness, so we don’t have to completely start the mental engine up again. I can relate; just after writing that sentence, I jumped online and bought a laptop, while simultaneously criticizing an American Idol judge, and looking at my phone. Yeah, baby!

I’m convinced that my brother started this 10 years ago, by constantly staring at his cell phone for news and sports updates, while everyone else has just recently caught on to the trend of staring at the tiny screens. I recently watched a kid in a restaurant spend the entire hour staring at his portable game’s tiny screen, ignoring everyone else around him — they ignored him too.

I worry about my own kids doing the same thing, and cutting themselves off from real human interaction. There’s a real art to conversation and writing (not that I’ve mastered either one), and without practice we might end up with a lot of socially clumsy people.

This is what I’m worried about. We could be divided into a tiny group of people who actually do stuff and accomplish things, while the rest of us read about it on our cell phones and talk about stuff others are doing.

One of my favorite sayings is that our lives are exceptionally brief and insignificant, like a fart in a hurricane. It’s up to us to make something of our time on earth, and staying “busy” isn’t good enough. My friends might call me out on this one, since I always seem to be busy, but I am making a big effort to actually do something useful. No guarantees on the results, though.

So back to the original point, the often-boring local government and school informational meetings. We can change that if we really want to. We can insist on plain language presentations, better explanations and balloon animals at every event. We could make every one of these meetings more like happy hour and less like a funeral, but our expectations are that they are supposed to be boring, so we keep up the charade.

My idea? We could start by making a “Citizen’s Summary” version of every major issue when they come up. Not everyone knows what R-6 zoning is, or “student interactive assessment tools,” but we should drop the diplomatic city-speak, ban any words over three syllables, and have a real conversation.

But it requires you to act. Just listening to me complain about it won’t get it done.