#SOTU

Before I watched the State of the Union Address I decided to jot down a few thoughts I had about Obama to see if my thoughts have changed.

I honestly don't know if Obama is a good President or not. I haven't followed the government too much and I am ashamed to say, like much of my generation I am an uneducated in this area. Which is the reasoning why I don't have a very strong opinion, I like to listen a lot before I make one, but even then I also myself vulnerable to change.

I was registered to vote and am ashamed again to say I was an educated voter that canceled out an educated vote, which Professor Green here at DSU argues why it is pointless for people to vote. I didn't vote for Obama, I felt like the country was voting for him because he was black and that is my honest opinion. I voted for Mitt Romney, because I had learned he helped Utah come out of debt utilizing the Olympics when it was hosted in Salt Lake City. Again, I am ashamed to say I never checked these facts and simply voted off of a gut feeling.

Now I am not racist. In fact, St. George is the whitest community I have ever lived in and is, for another fun fact, actually dubbed whitetopia according to Rich Benjamin, who traveled the US and studied whitetopias and whom I listened to in the Ted Radio Hour podcast titled Adaptation.

I think Obama is a good man and means well, but I don't know how well of a job he actually did.

#SOTU

I missed the beginning of it SOTU, but I don't think I missed much when I finally found it on the forbidden channel of Fox and didn't want to waste time finding where CNN is on the unlabeled sea of channels of cheap cable.

"The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period," Obama had stated. First of I was a little spectacle of this especially after the frame cut to a group of military personnel, who didn't smile, clap, or stand.

Now they could just be a group of angry old white conservative men, but I don't know. At the very least I don't think it is shameful to be skeptical. Second, I feel statements like these more or less puts a target on our back. We are not in a giant international sports league with other countries, these people will kill us.


Obama did say right after we don't make good decisions, but why do we say these things in the first place?

So I am not the most tech savvy or the most social media savvy, aka why I am taking this class. So, because of that I was confused at first when I first was following the twitter feed and watching SOTU and not seeing any radical comments. Then the light bulb went off and I realized there was a top tweet feed and all tweet feed.

You could find some tweet criticism in the top feed, but I felt like I was scrolling through advertisement. Click this, get involved here, etc. I also found it humorous that "Obama" was tweeting as he was speaking.


I appreciate the humor for keeping things light and the skepticism because I like being exposed to opposing views for the sake of keeping us on our toes, but it made me wonder how top tweets were choose and interesting to see some of the irrelevant things people paid attention to.

Then when I switch to the all tweets the feed was more balanced of negative and positive, and the radicals popped up that I was looking for.

I spent some time trying to find my own chirp in the vociferous amount of tweeting going on in the all tweets feed, but was unsuccessful. I also tried looking through my feed to see what my friends were saying, but like the rest of our generation they are as guilty as I had previously openly admitted to falling in the stereotype of not being involved.

One of my favorite parts of the speech was when Obama said we needed to be better citizens.

" It's a lot easier to be cynical; to accept that change is not possible, and the politics is hopeless, and the problem is all the folks who are elected don't car, and to believe that our voices and actions don't matter. But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future."

"... our collective futures depends on your willingness to uphold your duties as a citizen. To vote. To speak out. To stand up for others, especially the weak, especially the vulnerable, knowing that each of us is only here because somebody, somewhere, stood up for us. We need every American to stay active in our public life and not just during election time so that our public life reflects the goodness and decency that I see in the American people every single day."

This to me is one of the biggest problems in American, we are inactive and therefore uneducated and I hate that. I hate that about myself, about my generation, but we are not the only ones guilty of this. It is time for us to start getting involved, to become educated, learn to care again and to reestablish civility as a value quality in our culture. I want to be educated so I can be a good citizen.