Are you registered?

By Paula Thomas
Last week, while waiting for semantics class to start, a cheerful, young lady walked into the classroom carrying a folder full of papers and a friendly smile. "Hello, my name is Kate and I am here to make sure you are all register to vote," she said, while the room full of apathetic students tended to their notes and books.
"We are a non-partisan nonprofit organization and our work here in campus is to facilitate the voting process for students, like you and me, in the upcoming mid-term elections," she said strutting back and forth.
The room was ghostly quiet and it felt as if she was talking to the wall behind us. She kept trying to engage her audience with statistics like in the last elections only 1 in 3 students exercised their right to vote, "only 1 in 3," she said almost shouting. But it wasn't until she brought back history that she finally stroke a light and we were, suddenly, listening.

For decades the only ones allowed to vote were white males of higher economic and social status, then open suffrage (or the right to vote) was given to all white males regardless of their economic status, but women and African American men were excluded. 
After the civil war, in 1869 African American males were given the right to vote; but it took women another fifty years of activism before they were allowed to vote.

"People fought for their right to vote, for their right to be included in the decisions made by politicians, because those decisions affected them the same way the decisions politicians make now affect us, that is why we have to go out and vote and be inform about the issues and how they are being handled," Katy said with intense enthusiasm.

And she is right! Why have we become so lethargic about our rights, about the issues that affect our current reality and the people offering to speak for us? I must confess, I find the subject of politic daunting and frustrating, but so are many other things in life and that doesn't mean that we turn a blind eye on our problems, we face them. Katy made me realized I was wasting the sweat and blood of all those women who worked tireless to give me the right to speak up.

Perhaps in those times people had more interest in the effect of the laws voted on and the people elected because they didn't have screens [television, computers, tablets or smartphones] to keep them entertain with a fake reality of the world. They actually had to live with those realities and those decisions everyday and had little to focus away from it.
Even the slaves at the end of the Civil War were more in-tuned with the correspondence between the towns that involved the war and its outcome, as explain by Booker T. Williams in his biography Up from Slavery, "The slaves on our far-off plantation knew what the issues involved were, often the slaves got knowledge of the results of great battles before the white people received it."

So maybe we can use technology to our advantage, and between the Buzzfeed test to determine what is your color, the article about the 12 Reasons Why Sam The Cat With Eyebrows Should Be Your New Favorite Cat, or the latest celebrity gossip, we could, maybe, find time to look for articles, websites or non-partisan organizations that would help us make a more informed decision when we receive the ballot in the mail after we have diligently registered.

So, Are you registered?

If you need information on how to register to vote in Colorado
Click here
Other states, click here

Social Media Effect

Yesterday was my Facebook birthday, my real birthday was sometime ago. Why would you do that? I was asked. Why have a different birthday on Facebook? Identity theft was my answer.

Identity theft is a growing problem and we all know it. We complain about the government sticking its nose in our private lives, yet we have no problem in neatly outline it on our social media profiles. We are  eager to share personal information, like our birthday, address, hometown, graduation dates and email address, together with our picture. For a thief any little morsel is helpful. What is your favorite movie? your dog's name and birthday? Could any of the above information be a password you use for a bank account? In 2013, 13.1 million people were victims of identity theft, every two seconds a new person falls in this trap.

A few months back, the email that was connected to my Facebook account was hacked. Later, my bank account was blocked for trying to access it with a wrong password to many time. But I didn't attempt to access my account with the wrong password, so who did? We decided to change the passwords for all of the important accounts after my husband's bank account was blocked for the same reason. This time we didn't use the obvious name and birthday combo or pet name; and that is when I tried to erase my birthday information from Facebook, unsuccessfully. It's like a hostage program you can't get out unless you close the account. Having family and friends around the world who post fun pictures of their families and adventures kept me from closing the account, so I changed the information.

Social media is a great way to connect and communicate with loved ones, or to create a professional profile that allows you to develop followers, which is the reason why I use Twitter and Instagram. But, perhaps we step back for a minute to analyze what type of information we are sharing that could get us in trouble.

Thanks for the birthday wishes, I missed them on my real birthday!