Leaving Ohio
Tuesday, October 8th, 2008
Young voters registered yesterday - 78,930
Miles travelled today - 450
7:28 pm – Somewhere between Columbus and Chicago – Goodbye Ohio, hello Illinois! Goodbye Columbus, hello Chicago! Goodbye Bengals and Hello Bears! We are off to the land of endlessly disappointing baseball, impossibly tall skyscrapers, and eight-month winters.
The Ohio registration deadline was yesterday, and while early voting runs on up through election day, we are leaving Ohio and heading on to the Windy city (named for long-winded politicians not wind, though both are there). Tonight we will take the mother ship to The House of Blues for a concert with Nelly. The second phase of this tour has begun. We are still registering voters in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and several other states whose deadlines have not yet passed. But now we are beginning to concentrate on getting young voters out to the polls, a pretty substantial task in its own right. And, obviously, our primary purpose as an organization.
Which brings up a point: while we are a nonpartisan organization, we are not an indifferent one. There is nobody on this tour who does not have fierce political convictions of his own. We don’t all agree, but we do care. I mention this because with the coming of registration deadlines comes a slight change in our mindset. Before, we were seeking to expand the pool of available young voters. We were fighting against the complications of bureaucracy that prevent eligible people from voting. If anything it was an educational mission. We were trying to help young people understand the paperwork behind the process. Now we begin to shift towards a mission of motivation. If we were fighting against complication before, now we are fighting against apathy. Fight may not be the best word. Among the youngsters in this election, voting has become hip. Nine times out of ten, you ask one of us if we’re making it out on November 4th and the response is ‘Hell Yeah I’m voting.’
But there are the exceptions. There are potential voters, and we have met more than a few, who don’t vote because they are actually against the process of voting. Some are Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are forbidden from voting by their faith, and some are that ever present contingent of hermits, cranks, and cantankerous backwoods crazies who simply object to anything that shows support for our government. And then there are still the few - and they truly are few - among our generation who are just lazy. The most common expression of this laziness is the line “I don’t really know enough about the issues to pick one candidate over the other.” That may well be, but anyone with an internet connection or access to printed material can find out which candidate he or she thinks is right with a relatively small amount of research. And honestly, there is no voter who knows as much as he should, no politico who can see which candidate will better deal with our future. So you make your best guess. I have my own reasons for voting, but they are hardly more relevant that the millions of others out there. And - in a shameless plug for a good organization - you can fight this apathy and offer your own reasons to vote at amillionreasonstovote.com.
-- WRITTEN BY NICK BROWN
posted by Julia at 1:15 AM
1 Comments:
I got to play Assassin's Creed which kind of disappointed me. There is some great work in there, great work. The art is fantastic...the levels in that game are huge. The free running things works really well and feels wow power leveling great to control, though after awhile the joy and awe kind of wares off. I hated the story...the whole setting kind of frustrated me. I was so completely looking forward to playing as an assassin during the Crusades. When I first heard the wow powerleveling concept for the game and awe the screenshots I was pretty jazzed. That excitement was quickly smothered when I found out I was a descendant of Altair and I was in a simulation. Great...a game within a game. That really kind of spoiled the whole thing for me. I played about halfway through the game before I completely stopped. I think the wow gold sequel that is inevitably going to get made will be pretty good...though I think they have kind f locked themselves into the whole genetic memory story thread. There is some really great stuff in that game, but the story, and combat really kind of killed it for me. The combat is still not that great of an improvement over the POP stuff. It is decent, but it feels like it could be so much better if they would just give the power leveling player more control over the character.
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