Get your vote on - Today in school I had my students write a prompt about why it was important that you vote in a Democratic society. I was (as I always am) impressed with their thoughtful responses. Responses that make grown ups look like embarassingly infantile in their close mindedness. Any intelligent person who thinks by virtue of their own free will and doesn't just follow what other people say should only get smarter with age, alas, the fact that 8th graders are officially more enlightened than my peers is embarrassing on so many levels...well, for everyone except the eighth graders.
No matter who wins tomorrow I will be surprised. Who I think would be better doesn't matter and I'm sure you are too enlightened to be swayed by some low budget media maverick such as myself. Either way though I expect myself to be disappointed with what either one of them accomplishes. I don't believe in rhetoric and that's all you hear these days - sound bites, embarrassing little bits of drivel that someone wrote FOR them because they are too cowardly to come up with thoughts and opinions on their own for fear that someone might take offense and subsequently boycott them. I'm too lazy to boycott - and I will give whoever wins the benefit of the proverbial doubt - until they start doing wrong by their constituencies. And if history has taught us anything that won't take too long.
Buy some music - there is so much good music out there these days. One of my students was talking about how he wishes he lived when his dad did so he could have seen Queen, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. And yeah, those bands all rocked, and I'm sure the shows were sweet and everything but it's crazy to act like some of the music being made these days isn't that innovative cause honestly that's what made those bands so good. It wasn't just that they rocked hard or something goofy like that - they were doing something new and terrific and exciting. Check out Willy Mason's first album, go buy ANYTHING from Aesop Rock, ever heard of Robert Earl Keen or the Swingin' Utters?
The popular response is that these bands are novelties compared to the classic rock bands of yesteryear. Seriously? Led Zeppelin wrote songs about the Hobbit for god's sake. Queen was fronted by a gay man who wrote a song about women with large asses. Novel yes. Novelty? Hardly. Even the best musicians can be nerdy or funny. So why act like in order to be great it has to be old? Bump that. Go buy some new(er) stuff and in twenty years your kids'll be talking about how they love YOUR classic music.
Let people know how much you appreciate them - Lastly today in school I did an activity that I stole from a teacher I used to work with (Mr. Caron - thank you). He had every student in the class write their name on a sheet of paper. The papers were then passed around and everyone had to write SOMETHING nice about every student that was not about their looks, popularity, or things they owned. I did that with three of my four classes today and I would never have expected the response to be as overwhelmingly positive as it was. Students were asking all day if they could see theirs (I'm taking a break from typing them in order to type this). And the things they wrote - especially between students who I KNOW do not regularly get along was just beautiful. I do believe that if we all took a few minutes to look at the good in each other that we really could abide by Mr. King's words. We CAN all just get along. So (ideally anonymously as ours is) let someone know something you admire about them or something that you think was cool they did. It will take seconds and mean so much.
GET OUT AND VOTE!