"it's right because it's right"

Of the more than 1000 words we had to read for this class' assignment, there was only one part of it that actually made me think about something interesting. Why do people vote what they vote? this has been a question that has been on my mind since Barack Obama announced he received the nomination for president. as soon as people found out that there were be a black democratic nominee, there was chaos. some people, that i knew, immediately decided that they were going to be vote republican. was this a race issue? at the same time, even more people that i knew decided that they would vote for the black nominee.

This immediately bothered me, both sides. in my quest to find who to vote i asked these people why they thought their candidate was the best and the reasons i got were limite to none and i received plently of " its right because its right, i dont know".

Sympathy seems to have played the biggest role in this election, black and whites sympathized with the fact that this could be the year that we have the first african american president and the others thought that we should vote for the veteran and pow because he truly knew what it was to give your all to your country. blah blah blah, color will not run the country and something that a candidate did 40 years ago will not run the country either. what can these people do for us today???

I remember there was a church that i visited for a youth meeting and they were preaching about politics and the church. They said "if you vote democrat you are not a real christian". i was thinking to myself, what is their positioning for saying this statement and when i asked that, the youth leader said that it was because democrats support abortion. so wait, does not supporting abortion take us out of a recession? will morale alone take us out? i really dont think so.

When Schudson, author of Click here for Democracy, says that politics is more of chosing for comraderie than policy, he is absolutely right. the church that preached that was brainwashed by the pastor to believe that if they voted democrat they would go to hell and so McCain got all 1500 votes from that church.

If politics are run as a popularity contest i better start friending people now for my run in 2040!

IKE

Throw us a friggin' bone here!

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate/

Wow, talk about a forward article. This seems like one of those articles that says things that you only think about but never really find a way to say it out loud. When i first started reading this I was kind of skeptical of what was to come. We live in a split America? I definitely could never have concluded what the article was going to be about just from the first sentence. There are some parts of this article that I feel may be a bit too rough but i understand what the author means by it. When speaking in class the other day, Professor Solbrig bought up a good point about many of us, the students, not reading textual words on a paper to inform ourselves. I can honestly say that I like to pick up a newspaper to take to work and then sit and read it at break but it is so much easier to do on the computer or to just watch CNN at any time of day and let some one TELL me the news rather than me have to read it. Does that make me less literate? Chris Hedges seems a bit upset; this seems more like an chance to vent than a formal article.

I think it is important for people to understand that we cannot all be alike and say "hey, its alright that other people to read menus anymore and just order the bigmac from the picture thats up"..... or something like that. Let's read this article but also keep our own stance on the matter. Whichever way you can inform yourself, literate or illiterate, its better than nothing.