[tsl/leadership/teen] Election Day Event
On November 4th, 2008, many teens came together to discuss various issues regarding the presidential election led by Lee Soothsayer and myself. Despite not being able to vote, they still had ideas to carry the event for hours. When considering the idea to host a debate in teen second life, questions come up about whether or not teens are mature enough to discuss topics that are generally taken care of by adults. After hearing what some teens had to say, it was clear to me that the answer to the previous question was yes.
Even emotional topics, such as abortion and the minimum wage were discussed by the group of teens. Some other topics discussed included the Iraq War, the US economy, education, taxes, healthcare, and energy. As people started coming, the discussion really picked up into a fully fledged debate. The great thing was that everyone had respect for each other, and so the debate had not gone out of control.
For discussing the war in Iraq, we had used the agreement scales to put forth our opinions. For the most part, teens seemed to be against the war in Iraq and that America should pull out. With abortion teens were pretty much split with the idea of banning it. One argument was that it should be the choice of the person giving birth as it is part of them. The other side had put forth the argument of, what if the country’s best president could have been born, but was instead aborted. Pretty much for every topic discussed, there were enough people on each side to put forth valid reasons of argument.
After running this event with Lee Soothsayer, we both feel that teen second life is a perfect place to hold debates because teens have a huge amount of ideas and opinions to put forth, and after all, we are the future of the world.
