Hampton,Virginia

  President Barack Obama in his commencement address to Hampton University mostly criticized modern media and video games as equal diversions and that they posed new strains on democracy.

  In his address he  told the students that the key tot progress was education. In further comments he also spoke of iPods,XBoxes,iPads and PlayStations-”none of which I know how to work-information becomes a distraction,a diversion,a form of entertainment,rather than a toll of empowerment,a tool of emancipation.” Continuing he  spoke about blogs and talk radio “giving the craziest of claims traction” and saying that ” ..this is not only putting new pressures on you, it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.”

   In more traditional passages he spoke of competion with highly educated foreign graduates and of the life of Dorothy Height,the civiland womens rights pioneer who passed away earlier in the week at 98.

  Most notably, he seemed to contradict his points about media by drawing a  portrait of American progress through education with his lines about jefferson and the founders saying,” What Jefferson recognized… that in the long run, their improbable experiment-America-woudldn’t work if its citizens were uninformed,if its citizens were apathetic,if its citizens checked out, and left democracy to those who did not have the best interests of all the people at heart. It would only work ifeach of us stayed informed and engaged, if we held our government accountable, if we fulfilled the obligation of citizenship.”

   I invoking this passage about Jefferson, President Obama did not seem to lend an understanding that in  modern America, more people ARE informed and engaged and want to hold government accountable. He apparently tried to tie video games and entertainment to the news media he has a love/hate relationship with. Denegrating talk radio and the internet as nothing more than a distraction as well, our president apparently doesn’t notice that our graduates are the most engaged and informed citizens ever. They have been the forefront of the recipients of the 24 hour news cycle. People may disagree on what they have learned and believe, but they know the difference between Halo and DDR and media vs. government spin.

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