Youth

CLICK the pic to the left to find yourself magically transported to a page hosting my latest MTV Street Team '08 video, which was shot in Eugene, Oregon at a Martin Luther King Jr. rally and march on January 21, 2008.

All shooting, editing, and sleeplessness by Nezua.

Crossposted to The Unapologetic Mexican, Jesus' General, and Corrente.

Barack Obama: Barack Obama Last night I collapsed with exhaustion after spending several days coughing my lungs out. My son "Thing 2" probably saw it on my face when he asked me to snuggle with him in bed. I just passed out.

The last thought on my mind was --and I was thinking about this because I had every intention of blogging it-- that Edwards was going to win Iowa with Obama coming in on second. This was purely based on gut instinct and the kind of grassroots work I have seen unfolding from both campaigns. Hillary Clinton's campaign is too corporate, too top down and for that matter completely open and vulnerable to grassroots upsets.

And it showed last night.

Interesting piece of trivia : I should have known last night that Obama was going to win. I received a bulletin saying that Iowa had decided to lower the caucusing age to 17. Yes. 17 years-olds were voting last night at the caucuses. It may well explaining the huge turn out as well as the 57% of under 30 voting for Obama.

Here's the bulletin put out by the Maryland Democratic Party :

I see the world largely through the prism of women's lives, our rights and our issues. It's not, in anyway, at the exclusion of men, but I believe no matter what the struggles men have are, women are always trying to catch up, as it were. Many things have helped shape who I am today but none of them moreso than who I spent my first 51 years of life with, Sister, my only sibling. She was and continues to be the most powerful influence I've had.

There are many other women who have been changed my life in significant ways. One of these women is Lorraine, she teaches me things I've either forgotten or have never known about women. She brings the past of who women are and have been and blends it with the present, it's a gift of eloquence and sharing of knowledge I appreciate more than I can say.

That I have been invited to be a frontpager at Culture Kitchen is humbling and an honor. I thank Lorraine and Liza for that and will try my hardest to be worthy of their confidence in my writing and also in who I am, as a woman, as an American and a citizen of the world at large.

As a way to introduce myself, as a telling of how I became a Democrat and why I hold the present leaders of this party's feet to the fire is because they can do better, they must do better, they keep saying they are trying, it's time they understand it's not in the trying, it's in the doing that counts.

The US death toll in Iraq hit 3,000 on December 31. Not a good way to end the year. That number is for three years and ten months at war.
The US death toll in the United States for gang-related homicide was 1,072 in 2003 (Figure extrapolated from data pulled from the following two websites: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/vgm03.pdf http://crime.about.com/od/stats/Crime_Statistics_Data_and_Legal_Resource....

In contrast, we lost fewer than 500 soldiers in Iraq in the ten months of 2003 that we were there.

Tell me, what are we doing about the war right here? What are we doing about the people held hostage in their homes? What are we doing about the innocent bystanders being taken out in gang-related crossfire? Why is it that I had to research for over an hour, and then extrapolate the figure 1,072 using two different sources because the data just isn’t readily available?

Let me make it more personal. In 2006, I lost two former students to gang violence. Both young women were shot because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and not because they were themselves affiliated with gangs. Two current students were shot and survived. Both are affiliated with local gangs. Neither is allowed to live at home any more, because the families are too afraid to have them there.

Right here, in a suburban community of Los Angeles, over 30 miles away from Compton and over 20 miles away from East Los Angeles.

The under-30 crowd not only rocked the vote on Tuesday, but they did so happily in favor of Democrats:

Republican pollster Ed Goeas said young voters could have swayed a number of tight races on Tuesday, noting that of 28 seats Democrats picked up from Republicans in the 435-member House of Representatives, 22 were won by less than 2 percent of the vote and 18 were won by just 5,000 votes or less.

"The increase in the youth vote did come into play," he said.

Do we have to spell out why Generation Y would have voted Democrat?

A poll by Harvard University's Institute of Politics last week showed that by a three-to-one margin, young Americans said the country was on the "wrong track."

Forty-six percent favored a total troop withdrawal from Iraq within a year, while a third said troops should be withdrawn after the Iraqis take full control.

Future elections could also be at stake. The "Generation Y" of Americans born from 1977 to 1994 -- shaped by the September 11 attacks, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina -- in nine years will make up a third of the electorate.

Feeling it!