TALK ABOUT VOTING!
Published On 09-20-2008 , 11:40 PM
THE 2008 presidential campaign provides families on both sides of the political aisle some of the best lessons life has to offer.
Hot off the grill we get a look at unsafe sex resulting in teenage pregnancy and how families face the issue.
Then there's the question of credibility that, as parents, we have an opportunity on a daily basis to discuss and evaluate with our youth while we sit together chowing down at dinnertime.
Put civic responsibility lessons at the top of the chart. In fact, voting is always a discussion we need to have with our offspring.
In the middle of all this, there are too many families, and the parents lead the way, believing the candidates, campaigns, issues propositions on the ballot, along with registering and voting, have nothing to do with them.
While Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican VP candidate, is on just about everyone's talk list, for some it's her shenanigans that keep the conversation from taking root at the dinner table.
"Don't be silly," a parent demanded of me as she proceeded to talk about her teenage daughter who had a baby during her senior year in high school.
"Just what was she supposed to talk about with her kid?" she went on to ask. Mom remembered the family had been devastated to learn they would not be attending the high school graduation ceremony relatives as far away as Belize were planning to experience. And then mom continued to talk about the shame her
family experienced upon becoming part of the demeaning statistics that plague the African-American community.
Teenage pregnancy in low-income and minority communities that is billed as shameful, now being billed as a blessing when it comes to Palin's daughter, isn't a conversation this mom knew how to conduct, she said.
But the double standard is the exact kind of issue that leads the way to civic responsibility.
Susan B. Anthony and the women who worked with her in the suffrage movement surely must have had more than a few discussions that resulted in women being given the right to vote.
These suffragettes weren't willing to live with a double standard of men having the right and women being denied.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 protecting African Americans' historic fight to have their voices count on election day didn't come about because citizens shrugged their shoulders and said it was too hurtful of an issue for them to face head-on.
These civil-rights activist weren't willing to live with a double standard of whites having the right to vote and blacks being denied.
Then, this year, there's the lesson of duplicity. Our teenagers who often think they can fill out a job application by making themselves look like the person for the position can learn a lot by participating in a serious dissecting of the credentials Palin presents that are constantly being unraveled by up-close examination.
Whoa! These topics aren't worth discussing if the family isn't going to encourage all members who are, or will be, 18 years old by Nov. 4 to register to vote by Oct. 20.
For example, take teenage pregnancy, sex education and the right for a woman to choose and get the dinnertime round-table discussion members to put it into a 2008 election context and then talk about civic responsibility.
The time is long overdue to get everyone in our families involved in civic responsibility. Voting doesn't come about naturally. I suspect it's a family tradition.
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