How should we govern ourselves?
Well in the past couple if weeks instead of just writing an essay to answer this question PLP 10 split into groups and we created political parties! My group got together and realized we all wanted the same things for Canada so we created The Bright Party of Canada. If we had to place our party on the political spectrum I’d say that’d were pretty far left. You can read more about it here.
Our press release.
Going into this project I thought that I would realize that there’s a reason that the government isn’t putting more effort into saving the environment and tackling climate change but instead I realized that the only real reason is money. You can read more about my thoughts on that here.
The art I made with the quote” while the world is crumbling, they are funding the wrecking ball”
That was the first step of this project, figure out what you would change in our government. Then once we were put into groups we got to brainstorming. We made a press release to tell the world what our party stands for and how were different from other parties that already exist in Canada. My group realized that we all wanted change in the way the government is handling the climate crisis. But before we could make a political party we first had to learn about the existing political parties, we started by watching the political ad campaigns and political attack videos from the election that happened recently. I’ve never followed Canadian politics much before so watching the campaign ads was really helpful because I then better understood who was leading our country. Then we started doing research more locally, we researched the candidates in our riding. I also had a very interesting conversation with my neighbour, she has said that she is very right winged when it comes to politics and she’s very involved, before this projects I had thought that all things right-winged were bad because that’s what the media I see tells me. But my neighbour is getting a completely different side of the internet, the media she consumes is completely different, I realized how much of an effect social media algorithms are effecting politics today. I researched this further and found a very interesting article, it suggested that social media is affecting politics because politicians have to make more extreme views so they can get coverage in the media. In our school we did a mock election, usually I never know who to vote for, honestly in the past I just vote for the person with the funniest name but this year they were more then just names on a ballot, I actually thought about who I would’ve voted for if I could vote in the real election. It occurred to me that in the next election I might be able to vote, so its good I’m starting to understand Canadian politics now. You may be thinking how am I am keeping track of all this information?? Well there’s this incredible system called ZETTLEKASTEN.
Ive always been a person who enjoys taking notes but I used to take notes then never look at them again. My lightbulb moment for taking notes was when we had a test on the political spectrum and my notes perfectly prepared me for the test. And there’s a note I took that I still look back on and like to think about is actually a quote from Dave Meslim “Our system is leading to extremism”. This really stood out to me because I’ve never really taken a step back to see how extreme the two sides of politics are especially in the past two years. But we need extreme ideas to make extreme change in the world. With this information, research my group felt ready to create a political ad for The Bright Party. The making of it felt slightly rushed however my group got to work right away, we worked together and created our video. Here it is:
Even though this isn’t a perfect video my group was happy with how it turned out! It looks how we wanted it to and coveys the message that we wanted to get across. What was nice about making this video is that I could feel how much I had improved since last year. I felt much more confident making the screenplay and the storyboard didn’t seem so daunting. This felt really good to see the progress I’ve made. I actually went back and watched the first video I made in PLP and I can see that I’ve gotten so much better. If you wish you can watch that video here:
The contrast of those two videos is incredible and it encourages me to think how much further I have to go! See you next blog!
Leave a Reply