Last weekend I partook in the quintessential New Jersey experience: using its highways to travel to Philadelphia and New York City. On Saturday, Gayle and I decided to be tourists in Philly (since my previous experiences with the city of brotherly love have been less than ideal). First stop was the Constitution Center. This relatively new museum was quite interactive (in fact, the first exhibit is a historical high-tech, 360º video show with a live actor narrating). The rest of the museum is in the shape of a donut, with the general idea being that you move forward in time, learning how the constitution has evolved. The problem is that they have so little space, that information on modern-day politics gets mixed in with the Jeffersonian artifacts. So, it’s a bit discombobulated.
The most interesting interactive device was the “Can you vote?” machine. At each time period, you picked a state, and answered questions about yourself (age, race, gender, etc.). And when you answered a question in such a way to disenfranchise you, the machine made a loud buzz and displayed a red “DENIED” on the screen. A good wake-up call for what “democracy” really meant in the first two-thirds of our country’s history. (Go late 1700’s New Jersey, though!)
We had an early all-you-can-eat dim sum dinner before playing Philadelphia mini-golf. Franklin square had a course set up with all the sites of Philly as holes: Love park, boat house row, art museum, Ben Franklin bridge, etc. So I got to see all those sites, without actually having to go to the sites :) We finished off the evening with the “Lights of Liberty,” a video show that is projected on historic buildings in the historic district. The content was a bit less informative than I had hoped, but it was an appropriate ending to an educational day.
My New York City experience, on Sunday, was more social than enlightening. I hung out with Alissa, as we enjoyed the weather and gossiped about politics. Then I saw lots of old MIT Hillel folk at Andy & Bracha’s engagement party. Quite the amount of yummy food.
On an entirely different topic, today I hope my party comrades in Connecticut and Georgia can knock off two of my least favorite Democrats. For predictions, I’m going with Lamont 56 – Lieberman 44 in the CT-Sen primary and Johnson 59 – McKinney 41 in the GA-4 run-off election.
If Lamont does win, I hope the pundits can move past the war issue and see, as Rahm Emanuel does, that:
“What’s playing out here is that being a rubber stamp for George Bush is politically dangerous to life-threatening.”
Progressive Dems want their party to be an opposition party, and if you represent a state or district filled with progressive Dems (see: CT), don’t enable GW Bush and the Republicans.
