HW 30: Citizen Journalist: Tuesday

Today I attended the symposium for the noon to one thirty session. It was part of the Keene State College Citizenship Symposium. I found this lecture to be especially intriguing. The title of the session was "What Kind of Democracy Do We Want." The main topic was about the presidential race, how we vote, how politics is changing, and how young adults are becoming more and more interested. Today was the Fifth Symposium of World Affairs. Three thousand copies of the United States documents were copied. The provost spoke first. He introduced the Mayor and spoke about how the state of New Hampshire itself is a community. The mayor spoke and stated that today, Tuesday November 6, will official be known as "Citizenship Day" in Keene, New Hampshire. His hand and official seal was on the document and he physically presented it to the college. After the Mayor the first speaker, Mike Welsh spoke about how his students feel about politics. This was very intriguing because I could relate to many of the things he talked about. For example, he explained how young people are motivated to vote because of the impact on the votes that occurred in Florida. He also stated that they feel that when things get close in an election, the numbers become less important and the two sides efforts become more important. Young people feel that politics and power are what really matters most. He then introduced the main speaker of the event, Nancy Tobi. She is the founder of blockboxvoting.org. Her organization advocated hand counting ballots. She is a New Hampshire resident and founder of the, "Democracy of New Hampshire, Election Defense Alliance." The name of her lecture was "Citizens Gone Wild: Taking Control of Our Democracy." She began by relating how the wind at her back is Moses. She is a descendent of Aaron and described how Moses was a leader of a democratic movement. One of her main topics was on the government and constitution.

"Government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them. The people in delegating authority do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. We insist on remaining informed so that we may retain rights." - Bev Harris

Her main argument was on that of secrets and how through the development of checks and balances their is transparency among government. She stated that the government derives its power from the people. She also compared the constitution and government to that of New Hampshire. In one slide she presented many different articles of the constitution which all state that government power derives form the people. The government must be open, truthful, and excessive to the people. She kept restating how all the power resides in the people. One of the other most important things I found interesting was when she stated, “Politicians are like diapers." What she meant by that is that they need to be changed regularly. There are a lot of crimes that occur in the elections and changes need to be made now, before things get much worse. As she said, "There is sunlight at the end of the tunnel." It just might take us a while to get there, but we will and can make a difference.