This is an opinion column.

Do we really need Taylor Swift to sing the history of America? The Bill of Rights and the Constitution – Taylor’s version?

I don’t know. A lot of Americans can’t remember their own rights. But whatever. Taylor’s “Amendment No. 1” is gonna be dope.

I got a note from a young, bright, capable sound engineer the other day, part of a team of young, bright, capable people I’ve been working with on a podcast. He questioned a line I’d written about the rise of militias in the 1980s,.

The line went like this:

“Militias – constitutionally protected and held in the American psyche like Bunker Hill – took extremist views and recast them as the American way.”

The young, bright, capable sound engineer – he really is all those things – highlighted “Bunker Hill” and asked a question in the margin: “Too esoteric?”

And my head exploded in a burst of red, white and blue fireworks.

Bunker Hill too esoteric? Is the Boston Tea Party a New England gossipfest? Is Valley Forge just a Brooklyn espresso bar? Is Independence Day just a movie kids these days don’t remember?

It was made worse because I’d just had to defend my use of “Keystone Kops” to another young, bright, capable colleague. I’d explained the phrase was in the vernacular long before I was born, that you didn’t have to watch silent films to know the Kops had come to mean any bumbling bunch. All you need is context clues and a skosh of cultural literacy.

But then I screwed up and mentioned Barney Fife, and it was like I was speaking Latin. A dead language.

Bunker Hill, of course was a desperate stand from the Revolutionary War, and though most of the action actually happened at nearby Breed’s Hill and the Americans lost, it took on mythical status as the place where plucky colonials convinced themselves they could stand toe-to-toe with the world’s most fearsome fighting force. It’s where, we’re told, they were ordered not to fire “until you see the whites of their eyes.” It’s about American grit.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t care if young, bright, capable people don’t remember VCRs or AM radio or stepping off a plane to see their families waiting at the gate. So what?

I get it if they can’t visualize a world of payphones and busy signals, of football games without a yellow line to measure first downs, of dial-up and phone books and silence. Of getting totally, completely lost. And being totally, completely ok with it.

I don’t care if they don’t know Sam Cooke or James Brown or Buddy Holly.

I mean, I do care, but it ain’t my loss.

But it’s clear there’s a lot we Americans need to remember about America. About our freedoms and ambitions. We can’t let it drift into esoterica.

How our founding fathers sometimes hated each other, and disagreed violently about many things, but worried together about tyrants and overreach. They separated the powers of government to watch over one another. They wrote the Bill of Rights (better than Taylor could) to ensure our government doesn’t take our stuff, or lock us up without going through the legal process, or punish us for saying the wrong thing.

About how we don’t have to be alike or agree. Except to agree on that. These moments and beliefs made us who we are. They set the course for who we can be.

I told an older editor I was gonna write Off-the-Cliff’s Notes for young, bright, capable people to lay out all these important moments.

Nah, he said. They don’t know what Cliff’s Notes are.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner.