Monday, November 12, 2007

hw30: citizenship symposiums

On Tuesday November 6th and Thursday November 8th, I attended two citizenship symposiums at Keene State College. Tuesday's symposium featured guest speaker Nancy Tobi. Nancy was born in Lexington, Massachusetts. Lexington is known as the birthplace of American liberty. Nancy said that growing up in Lexington made her aware of politics and democracy. Throughout her speech, Nancy spoke of different types of voting techniques and how they are used. The Diebold machine counts each vote by machine, and hand counting is as simple as it sounds, the votes are counted by hand. Tobi mentions that 81% of New Hampshire uses the diebold method, which to me seems more credited and easier to do than hand count massive amounts of votes. Nancy was very adamant on getting her point across about the difficulties when it comes to voting, she hopes that in the future things will get easier for our nation.
On Thursday, I attended another symposium given by a US representative and Holocaust Survivor, Tom Lantos. Tom was introduced by his daughter, Katrina. As with any daughter, Katrina had very positive things to say about her father and their relationship while she was growing up. Once Lantos took the stage, he spoke of his experiences while growing up and how difficult it was for him being an immigrant and not really accustom to the way this country works. I found Tom’s speech very powerful because it shows how much people take our country for granted sometimes, although there are things going on here that can change.

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