WARNING: This post may be too political for some people. And, also, is a VERY long post.

NOTE: I, in no way, expect anyone else to have the same opinions as me but, since this is my blog, I am free to express my opinions and you can choose to agree or disagree and then that would be your opinion. Thank you for listening.

TEN YEARS AGO THIS MONTH

I was lucky enough to go on a trip through my high school to Washington, D.C. and learn more "Close Up" about our government and learn more about how and the way it works. (I would like to thank my parents and grandparents for helping me raise the money to go and anyone else that may have helped to contribute.) When I went, there were a few kids from different states that were in the group I was with from North Dakota, Alaska, and Hawaii.

There were several things that we were able to do while in D.C.
*We were able to see the monuments, of course
*Go into the Capital Building (if you ever go to D.C. you should go. They have statues of 2 people from every state of the union in there and one of the statues is of Philo T. Farnsworth, one of my ancestors, who invented the television!)
*Go into the Senate Chamber (the visitors part but still I was in there and able to look around. In fact it was on the day that John McCain was debating about the McCain/Feingold Bill which is now known as the Campaign reform bill of 2002)
*Go into the Supreme Court Building during a trial (are they called trials in there?)
*And, overall, see the sights of D.C.

Besides seeing the sights we also went and sat through different lectures. They were all about things doing with the government but mostly (to me) it was a bunch of lobbyists telling us how they try to lobby our political figures to vote certain ways or try to change laws. One example was sitting through about 2 hours of an environmental lobbyist and how his company has been working on changing things with the EPA. I can't remember exactly but I do remember them showing us a movie about the environment that was not the most interesting movie to show a bunch of teenagers. To me, it felt like they were trying to lobby us teenagers in the way "An Inconvenient Truth" tries to scare us about global warming years later. This could have been because my father was a biology teacher and had taught me a lot about the environment growing up and so I had already made up my own mind what we as a society should do to help protect the environment (I'm not going to go into that here; it would be much too long.)

One of my most memorable parts of this trip was not going to see all the landmarks and museums, although I hold all the memories very dear, but one of the lectures that we had to go and listen to was of this guy who said that he was a media lobbyist. He went through a nice little speech about how the media is uninfluenced by the government and how, in fact, the media actually influences the government and helps to get the government to change by the way the media spins stories. The whole time I was sitting there I was just shaking my head. I just couldn't believe that here in front of me and this whole group of teenagers, this guy was trying to tell us that the media was so unflawed so, in a way, untouchable that they were free to report how they wanted to without repercussion from others. After he was finished talking, we were allowed to ask him questions. Since he bugged me so badly about how he kept saying how the media can report how and what they want, I rose my hand.

Here I am, an 18 year old girl, who isn’t really supposed to buck the system and I stand up and ask him a question. I stood and and asked “How can you say that the media is not influenced by the government? There are countless examples in history about the government covering up major stories that they didn’t want the American public to know.” And to drive my point home, I gave him an example: “If you say that the media can report how they want then can you explain why the media never reported about the Holocaust in WWII until well into the war and after the US entered into the war? The government knew the atrocities going on in Europe and our government turned away from it. It wasn’t until after we got into the war that we were told as if to keep the public in the dark and ignorant. And then after the entrance of the US into the war, the government had all sorts of propaganda films made to be released to get public support of the US in the war.” I got a huge round of applause from the room and the guy took no more questions after that and never did answer my questions.

I don't know why I really ever felt like I needed to stand up and speak out. I guess I had just gotten fed up with all of these lectures telling us teenagers how we should think and that this was the way the government was supposed to work. I felt like what was supposed to be a week of learning the ins and outs of the government ended up being an awaking to me of some messed up sides of the government. I won't say it was a bad experience. I'm grateful for it. I think, if anything, it helped me to understand more "real world" things than just graduating into the world and trying to learn them after graduating. Our world and our government are not perfect, but I do think that we all need to be more aware about what is going on in it. We shouldn't just take what is written or said as truth in the media. We, as humans, need to question things, ask ourselves and find out for ourselves what is true, right and question things when you know it doesn't sound or look right.

For the final dinner that we had at the end of the week I was chosen from my group (we were split into smaller groups at the beginning) to get up and represent our group and our opinion of the week and how we all felt it was for us all. I don't remember what I said in that little speech but I remember it was more poignant and thought-provoking than others that had stood up to speak for their groups and that it made everyone cheer. That made me pretty happy.

By the way, this flashback is brought to you by the film "The Tillman Story" which I watched tonight with Jason. It is a good movie. It also shows how the government covered it all up and lied not only to the family but to the world through the media and then went on to try and use the media to pen Pat Tillman as a hero who died in battle to try and put a positive spin/face of a war that had very low public support for to try and gain more support for it.

I'm sorry. I'm done. Thanks for listening/reading.