What's in a Name

To start off, I began classes today, and I'm still looking for work, so I might not be blogging as much as I've been, although I'll certainly blog as often as I can. Also, thanks to visitors for leaving comments; it gives me a real sense of purpose and also gives me the knowledge that people are coming here, giving me that much more incentive to blog, even at times when I'm not that up to it.

Anyway, I started classes today, and in one class, we somehow got onto politics, the professor was using it as some kind of an example on a class problem. She mentioned the top-tier candidates, like Clinton and Obama, and then she mentioned Mike Huckabee, and that she couldn't possibly vote for someone with the name of Huckabee. Like, it's irrelevant where someone stands on issues that you care about, but when their last name doesn't sound "presidential", you won't be pulling the latch for them in November.

I know I go on a lot about Washington, and the media, and corporations, and how one (or more) of them is always behind most of what ails us as Americans, but we ourselves play a significant part as well. We lost our civic spirit a long time ago, which can only be found in high school textbooks. When we pay attention, but not for long, we rage on about something without usually having a clue of who we should be angry at, or what we should do about it. After that, we go back to watching American Idol or watching the "news" channels report 24/7 on some actor who died from taking too many pills or browsing celebrity gossip blogs. And when we go vote, if we do even that most minimalist of civic duties, a lot of us base who we vote for on how handsome a candidate is, or how nice his hair looks, or his last name. We know nothing of our candidate's policies, what he'll do once he enters office, or who's paying for his campaign.

BTW, I was watching Bill Maher earlier, and I saw video of Bill Clinton sleeping while a black man was making a speech, on MLK Day! I've heard nothing of this on the news media until I saw it on Maher's show.