Sunday, January 31, 2010

Audience Profile

"If you do not turn on to politics, politics will turn on you."

Political activist and four-time presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, spoke these words during his acceptance speech of the Green Party's presidential nomination in 2000. Ten years later, his words ring as true now as they did back then. With ever-advancing communications technology, the actions of governments are easier to track than ever before. On the other hand, governments kept the pace and are using the same technologies to convince the public that it’s doing the best it can to serve them.

But is it? I might just be cynical about our elected leaders, but after two ill-advised wars and a severe recession, I feel that our elected representatives may not have been holding our best interests at heart. As political revelations and scandals during the Bush administration continue to emerge, it seems to be getting clearer that many politicians had become more concerned with their own wealth and power.

After feeling the effects of a government run wild, people were anxious to use their voting rights to steer the country in a new direction. During the 2008 election, the numbers of students who voted surged, which is a good sign. It would be surprising if many students didn’t want to positively affect the direction their country was heading after experiencing the effects of two wars and a severe recession.

However, the students shouldn’t stop voting there. Each state has its own governing bodies made up of elected representatives who enact policies that affect how we live. Thus, I believe it is just as important to be aware of what is going on in our state government as it is to know what's going on in our federal government. And I believe students have a unique position to affect their local governments.

Therefore, my audience is the students at this university who may or may not have realized how they have been affected by their local and national government and aren’t sure how they can have a say in the actions of these entities. As a student myself at a rather prestigious public university, I realize most of us are probably quite well off. Our parents paid most, if not all of our tuition and we’ve always had everything we’ve needed. What reason do we have to get active in keeping up to date with the latest local or national political news?

On the other hand, there are those at this university who haven’t always had what they wanted or needed. They may have had to apply for student loans because their family could not afford to pay the tuition. Or they have experienced some kind of discrimination while growing up for certain beliefs and choices of how to live their lives. They walk to class feeling a nagging anger that things aren’t completely right, and they wish they knew how to change their circumstances.

The one thing each of these groups has in common is this: they can vote, but they choose not to, either because they are unsure of what their elected representatives are doing, or because they simply haven’t found a reason to care. What each of these audiences need are organizations that will report accurately and with the information that is most relevant to all of these demographics.

I will dedicate myself to help spread awareness of what is going on in the governmental level of life in the clearest and most relevant ways I can so that my audience will understand what is happening and decide whether or not they care to affect it. My focus will be on the local Oklahoma government and how its policies could affect the livelihood of students. Quite often, decisions made at the national level have far-reaching consequences on states, and I will cover any of these decisions that will impact our university and the lives of its students.

As radical historian, Howard Zinn says, “Democracy is not a spectator sport.” The people are the players. And the students have a unique place in this system to enact change for the benefit of the people. As long as we do not lose sight of the power we students have, the politics will not turn on us.