Civic duties
Last week I sat in on an instruction session for a freshman composition class. The session itself was pretty straightforward -- I think they were working on pretty basic research papers. Before they got started, though, the professor got up and went over some housekeeping issues related to the larger course. Namely, making sure that everyone had successfully registered to vote, because that's part of their grade. She had apparently registered all of the students who lived on campus or in the area, and she was following up on registrations that didn't go through, as well as a few with non-local addresses. Then she announced that the theater in town was screening An Inconvenient Truth and that she'd give extra credit to anyone who went; she urged them all to attend, even if their topic wasn't global warming.
I was impressed, to say the least. I remember talking about the election in high school civics, but not much more than that, and in college I barely paid attention to the local elections because I was registered at home. To see a professor to get that involved in making sure her students were exercising their rights and responsibilities as citizens was pretty exciting to me.
Not that it's an easy election to vote in. I've read a couple of things recently on the idea of a "none of the above" option on the ballot -- basically saying that all the candidates suck and we want new ones. It might be a step up from the lesser-of-two-evils style of voting that we're faced with in a lot of the local races here this time, but I'm concerned about how long the whole thing would be dragged out before someone came up with a candidate that sucked less.
In the Trib the other day there was an editorial cartoon showing TV newscasters announcing the election results -- I can't find it online now, but basically Obama had been elected Cook County Board president, governor, state representative, etc., etc. He's been getting some crap here lately, but I'd still take him over pretty much any of the idiots running for various offices that are up for grabs right now.
I was impressed, to say the least. I remember talking about the election in high school civics, but not much more than that, and in college I barely paid attention to the local elections because I was registered at home. To see a professor to get that involved in making sure her students were exercising their rights and responsibilities as citizens was pretty exciting to me.
Not that it's an easy election to vote in. I've read a couple of things recently on the idea of a "none of the above" option on the ballot -- basically saying that all the candidates suck and we want new ones. It might be a step up from the lesser-of-two-evils style of voting that we're faced with in a lot of the local races here this time, but I'm concerned about how long the whole thing would be dragged out before someone came up with a candidate that sucked less.
In the Trib the other day there was an editorial cartoon showing TV newscasters announcing the election results -- I can't find it online now, but basically Obama had been elected Cook County Board president, governor, state representative, etc., etc. He's been getting some crap here lately, but I'd still take him over pretty much any of the idiots running for various offices that are up for grabs right now.
posted by Madame Defarge at 3:29 PM
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