President Obama Has His Work Cut Out For Him

As I was writing this editorial, I started writing about Immigration Reform and was really getting into the point of view of the “poor illegal immigrant” who, if we are honest with ourselves, gets the short end of the stick, on a pure humanistic point of view. Of course they shouldn’t come into the country illegally, but does the U.S. on purposely make it harder for Hispanics to be able to come to America legally? That was one question I had. Another was does America benefit from having so many illegal immigrants here? One site stated that illegal immigrants social security contributions is in the billions and will continue to grow, because they have no legal rights to this money. Then I started reading about the cost associated with having illegal immigrants in the country and I thought this is too much information for me to process in such a short time.

I dropped that topic and decided to write about something I’m passionate about, which is tougher laws on sex offenders especially crimes against children. I’ve raved many times to my husband how I feel that crimes against children need tougher punishments. I believe anyone that rapes a child should be put to death, because they are worthless human beings and should not be allowed to exist. Then I thought, molesters should be put to death too. I started thinking, what will be the “beyond a reasonable doubt” that would determine if they get put to death. Would there have to be DNA evidence? Well as you can imagine, I started getting very frustrated, because I’m not a lawyer. I’m a mother and I love my children and I believe all children are God’s gift and should be safe in this world. So, I gave up on this pursuit and moved on to the next subject.

Education is another of my passions. I believe that we need to do something in this country to enable all Americans to be able to afford a college education. We need to insure that all children are getting the best education that America can give and if we need to improve our standards, then we need to get moving. America is falling behind countries like India and China. If we want to remain the best nation in the world, then we need to get off our rears and make sure that our children are in the same league in math and science as other countries.

After going through just these three topics, I have to say that I realize that President Obama has his work cut out for him. That he will need to surround himself with experts and passionate intelligent people to be able to accomplish anything in his term in office. That we as American need to be more informed in all aspects of whatever subject we are passionate about to be able to make a difference in the laws and the changes needed to keep America the greatest nation in the world.

by Genoveva Nannapaneni

Critique on: Ms. Zeiss' Editorial

Obama Passes New Hate Crimes Law

I found this editorial quit interesting in so much that it touches on a subject matter that affects millions of Americans nationwide. This editorial has enough information to help identify why the law that was passed was named Mathew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. It also explained that this law was expanding on the 1969 United States Federal Hate Crimes Law to include crimes committed by a victims actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

I agree with Ms. Zeiss on the importance of this law being passed. It is time that we as nation stood up and protected all our citizens, no matter what religion, race, creed, gender, disability or any other difference that we may have. Every individual deserves to be treated with respect and have equal protection under the law.

Like Ms. Zeiss, I can only hope that this is the beginning of our nation taking the firm and decisive steps to insure that all its people can live and feel that they too matter. We as a nation must protect all our citizens. We cannot be a country where a person is afraid to be who they are because they do not fit into someone else’s views on how a person should live their lives. We are all different individuals and as such we have the unalienable rights given to us by God and our founding fathers to the pursue of happiness.

The only thing that would have made reading this editorial more helpful would have been if Ms. Zeiss had actually typed out what the abbreviations LGBT, DOMA, DADT and ENDA stand for and embed a link to these groups.

Up until the last paragraph I was following along, but I got lost in all the abbreviations that were unknown to me. Other than that I found Ms. Zeiss editorial interesting and I enjoyed reading it.

by: Genoveva Nannapaneni