I feel like this semester just barely started, yet one of my professors reminded me that we only have 5 classes left. Wow. I think I looked at her like she had 4 heads, but then I went to my planner and looked...lo and behold - 5 classes - and that's when I realized all of my Saturdays are spoken for in April. Oye.
Anyway, we were discussing voters' rights and the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama in class on Monday. It's interesting to read about Martin Luther King and realize, even though he was assassinated in 1968, his teaching still live on. After "Bloody Sunday", King was planning to march all the way to Montgomery, Alabama to protest the treatment of blacks in the South, particularly in Selma, where blacks were subjected to tests and inane questions before being allowed to register to vote. If they got the question wrong (such as "how many bubbles are in a bar of soap?"), they were not able to register.
Law enforcement officials deemed the march to Montgomery to be illegal, but King refused to cancel the march. King was persuaded by a town official to march, instead, to the scene of "Bloody Sunday" and no farther. So, he marched to the bridge in question, prayed, and turned around. Befor turning around, however, he looked up and realized all of the state troopers blocking his path up the highway to Montgomery had parted. He decided to ignore his want to march further, knowing that's what the troopers wanted; if he broke the law, they could have arrested the entire group. This just proves that, sometimes, it's what you DON"T do that matters. As King said, "The vote is not the ball game, but it gets you inside the ballpark." If he had broken the law, he would have negated all of the gains he realized by bring the nations attention to Selma. Then, it would have been all for naught.
There is about one month before my town elects a selectman. Currently, we have the woman I'm campaigning for, a guy who has absolutely no platform, and a current selectman who has just proposed somehow pulling $1M into our rainy day fund without addressing the fact that health insurance rates go up about 7-10% a year. It's interesting. At any rate, our database is up, and I've been working on adding additional information. We had a bit of an issue with snide emails about the lack of interactiveness, even though we had decided to only have a few people input information to minimize mistakes. I decided to open the database to the group, however, since I have a master list on my computer. I'll back it up once a week to minimize the damage if someone deletes it, but I'm not even going to stress.