HW 30: Citizen Journalist post

This past week I attended a couple of the Keene State College's 5th Bi-annual Symposium on Citizenship speeches. The first speech I attended was the kick-off speech to the week on Tuesday given by Nancy Tobi. The speech was introduced by KSC Provost Emile Netzhammer and also by city of Keene mayor Michael Blastos. Nancy's speech was entitled "What Kind of Democracy do We Want?" Before the speech began, there was a presentation from Mayor Blastos to the KSC Provost of documentation that Tuesday November 6, 2007 was officially declared Citizenship Day in Keene. Nancy presented a powerpoint presentation to the audience about democracy and the different things that make a government a democracy. The whole idea behind her speech was showing the audience how a democratic form of government is supposed to be run by the people and how the people have a right to know and see what is going on. She has a quote in her presentation that I wrote down that is a pretty good representation of this, "Government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them". She then shows the audience how this is far from whats going on in the United States however. One thing I found to be most interesting from the speech was finding out that votes are supposed to be counted in the view of the public, yet in New Hampshire only 45% of the polling places use actual people to count votes. The other 55% of the polling places, counting 81% of the state's votes use electronic secret vote counting software. This particular fact was interesting to me because I can't figure out how the government has taken the control away from the people and made it such a secret organization. It just isn't right that we the people allow ourselves to be governed by such a secret group and not have any clue whats really going on behind closed doors.

The second speech that I attended was also on Tuesday. This speech was a screening of the documentary "Secret Daughter" by June Cross. June was in attendance for this screening so that was pretty exciting. She is a journalist/filmmaker who made a movie about her past and how she was kept hidden from the world by her own mother. There was an introduction to the event by a foreign lady who was very difficult to understand. I failed to take a quote or sentence from her introduction to talk about here because I could not follow a single sentence of her speech. The documentary was a very good one. Cross really did a good job of bringing the truth out about her identity and showed how she dealt with living in secrecy of who her real mother was for most of her life. The thing I found most interesting about this presentation was not anything said by Cross but rather how her whole childhood she had to live without calling her mother "mom" because her mom was white and she was black.

This concludes my time attending the Keene State Citizenship Symposium. I think both presentations were very well done and the whole idea of making people aware of citizenship was a good one for the symposium this year.