Last week, Governor Bruce Rauner said that he had spoken with both Senate President John Cullerton and House Speaker Michael Madigan about his proposed sale of the state's Thompson Center building in Chicago, and that both men were "forward leaning and positive" about the plan.

So I checked in with the legislative leaders, and that's not exactly what I heard.

"The governor and President Cullerton spoke," said the Senate President's spokesperson Rikeesha Phelon. Okay, so far so good. At least these weren't "phantom" phone conversations like the ones Governor-elect Rauner claimed he had with those two on election night last November, but didn't.

"We will take a look at the specifics of the plan in light of state statutes regarding property control and facility closures," Phelon continued.

Um, wait. That doesn't sound all too "forward leaning and positive." I asked Phelon: Is Cullerton positive about this at all?

"I would say the word is 'open,' but under review," she replied.

After 21 years of publishing, the depth and breadth of civic disengagement continues to befuddle me, confirming that people get the government they deserve. Everyone senses the undercurrent of serious trouble afoot in this country. But no amount of leaderships' disgraceful conduct, criminal enterprise, or wholesale injustice - all of which cause profound suffering for our families, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and community at large - rises to a level that produces meaningful activism. Why is that?

Mostly it is because of denial, lack of imagination, laziness, inertia, and an absurd amount of self-absorption. Ignorance plays a part, but most people are intelligent enough to grasp problems. Instead, they choose to ignore such matters as a means to absolve themselves from responsibility head-in-the-sand style. Clearly, this is not the American way. Or at least it didn't used to be.

No matter how much civic impotence we claim, there is still plenty we can individually affect if we are willing to sacrifice a bit of convenience. Our ancestors, after all, sacrificed their lives.

Last week we saw what's become a regular headline: "Republicans Threaten Government Shutdown." This year's excuse was a feud over whether to continue writing an annual $500-million corporate-welfare check to Planned Parenthood.

With bated breath, the mainstream media informed us that the usual suspects on Capitol Hill were "working feverishly" to avoid the "shutdown." If they hadn't worked out a deal, the media would have squeezed a few more days or weeks of purple prose out of this fake calamity.

Yes, fake.

There was not going to be any "government shutdown." There's never been one, nor is one likely in the future. Or at least not until the U.S. government as we know it "shuts down" for good. (Yes, that will happen someday; nothing lasts forever.)

Nor are these fake "shutdowns" anything close to calamities. At worst they're mild inconveniences, and then only because Americans have acquiesced in government doing far too many things for far too long.

In May 2015, the federal government suffered a massive data breach, a hack that exposed the names and Social Security numbers of more than 21-million people.

In a press release, the Office of Personal Management (OPM) reported that as a result of its "aggressive effort to upgrade the agency's cybersecurity posture," the agency discovered the massive theft of background records, reportedly originating in China, including "identification details such as Social Security numbers; residency and educational history; employment history; information about immediate family and other personal and business acquaintances; health, criminal, and financial history; and other details. Some records also include findings from interviews conducted by background investigators and fingerprints. User names and passwords that background-investigation applicants used to fill out their background-investigation forms were also stolen."

This was a new breach - not the same looting of 4.2-million records that the agency discovered in April of this year.

The news didn't stop OPM Director Katherine Archuleta, appointed to the post in 2013, from congratulating herself for the agency's great strides in security. It was her "comprehensive IT strategic plan" that led to the knowledge that these incidents had happened.

But Archuleta lasted about one day after praising herself for noticing the theft, and the latest news is that the fingerprints of 5.6-million people were also grabbed in the mega-hacking of OPM's "cybersecurity posture."

OPM assures us that "federal experts believe that, as of now, the ability to misuse fingerprint data is limited." As of right now ... this second ... as we hit the press ... you probably have nothing to worry about if your fingerprints got stolen from OPM's data banks. Hurrah.

Even Archuleta would probably concede that discovering a robbery is not quite as good as preventing it. But let's go so far as to say that the nature of bureaucracy itself is more to blame than Archuleta is for having failed to fix how her agency functions.

Of course, governments are not the only organizations vulnerable to being cyber-attacked because of lax security. Other victims in recent years have included Target, Chase, and Sony.

But it's the decades-old privacy-invading policies of the federal government that have routinely converted all such breaches of personal data into potentially limitless disasters for the victims.