The more things change, the more they stay the same

Bush supporters say minority education is up 4.8 percent, but blacks in Florida's state-run public universities are still underrepresented.

I have to hand it to the Bush clan. No other political family has mastered the art of distraction quite like them, evidenced by Dubya's entire presidency. The Kennedy family may have a more popular brand, but Bush is synonymous with unwavering spin and truth redefinition.

So I must applaud Florida governor Jeb Bush for his ridiculous claim that he helped improve the education of minorities in the state. Bush recently addressed a crowd in Orlando and patted himself on the back for the “progress” Florida’s blacks and Hispanics have made during his administration. He cited an “academic study” -- which just happened to be funded by two wealthy Republicans who donated to his gubernatorial campaigns -- to support the claim. According to them, Bush is a “trendsetter” who revolutionized minority education.

Way to go, Mr. Governor. Your keen leadership has led to a whopping 1.6 percent increase of black enrollment in the State University System (SUS). Since Florida's students trail other states in math skills, I’ll translate that into a more practical number. There are 606 more black students in the SUS than there were last school year. That’s pretty impressive for a state that graduated more than 130,000 students in 2006. Right?

Governor Bush performed a unique miracle. He lifted black students from the bottom of the educational totem pole and brought them all the way to…the bottom of the totem pole. Laying it on like only a Bush could, he made the stagnant education gap between blacks and whites seem like a positive thing.

Who else but a Bush could say that the One Florida plan increased opportunities for black students, even though the number of blacks accepted into the SUS decreased after it was implemented? Who else but a genius capable of walking on water could use a 1.6 percent increase to say, “We have made progress in this state over the last eight years. We know because we measure. It's one of the guiding principles of what we do”?

Well, measure this, Mr. Governor. In 1999 – the year you first took office – blacks made up 14.2 percent of the SUS population. Now, they account for only 13.7 percent. You call that progress? Even for a Bush, that takes a lot of nerve.

Bush has a knack for distorting reality, but even he can’t mask this unfortunate truth. As a senior at Florida International University, I can assure the esteemed governor that his One Florida plan isn't working. I attend both of FIU’s main campuses, and I’ve often been “the black guy” in class. No matter what course or what time of day, I'm typically the resident Token. The few occasions that there are other black students in a course I take, we nod at each other the first day of class. We're all strangers, but inside the increasingly exclusive halls of the SUS, that nod is an unspoken acknowledgement that we are rare drops of black in a sea of whites and white Hispanics.


But, I guess we should be grateful to be in college at all considering how much Bush has failed the state’s education system. When I graduated from Coral Reef Senior High in 2002, Florida had the worst graduation rate in the country at 55 percent (only 46 percent of blacks graduated that year). The Florida education system failed thousands of teenagers, but Bush said he improved it as he ran for re-election. He eventually won the governor’s race, but our state lost its way. Four more years of Jeb saw the graduation rate increase to 56 percent. Florida still ranks among the worst in the country, but at least we've made progress, right?

For the 2006-2007 school year, there are only 52 more black freshmen than there were last year. Among all 11 universities in the SUS, there are only 52 more black students than there were last year. Even if those students sat in every other seat, they would still fill one lecture hall at the University of Florida. Yet, Bush considers such mediocrity progress.

If Bush or those affiliated with him truly cared about improving black enrollment, they would do so by spending $250,000 on the school systems in desperate need of better resources – not on a self-serving “study.” They would go to Tallahassee and spark positive reform rather than simply talk about it for eight years.

It’s easy for Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist to ask in his campaign ad, “Will Florida continue to be a national leader in education reform; continue to offer hope and promise to our people? Or will we go back to the days that have failed us in the past?”

Unfortunately, it’s not so easy for Crist to realize how ludicrous and misleading those questions are. Educational opportunities for blacks have not improved under Bush’s One Florida initiative, and they never will until people admit that there’s no such thing as one Florida. Black students at Miami Edison Senior High, grossly under-funded, underdeveloped and understaffed, are a world away from the affluent, white students at Miami Palmetto Senior High. Both schools are in the same city and separated by less than 20 miles, but the educational gap between them stretches much farther.

Until people are willing to accept that undeniable reality, the social and educational status of blacks in Florida will never change. Then again, how can you expect change in a state where the word progress is just a synonym for normality?

I always feel like somebody's watching me

Facebook dropped the ball – big time. The social-networking website popular among college students upset a large portion of its members when it introduced “News Feed.” The feature reported whenever a user changed his or her profile, became friends with another student, updated a picture, or did almost anything else on the website.

If you sneezed, News Feed said “God bless you” and notified all of your friends.

Facebook members complained and the website’s management caved. Students were given the option to disable the feature and Feedgate came to an abrupt end within four days.

Wow. Activism works fast these days.

It’s amazing that a bunch of whiney college students can complain about “privacy” on a site designed to reveal their faces and personal thoughts. It’s even more astonishing that the controllers of such a website would give in to complaints in less than a week. It took previous generations more than a decade to convince the U.S. government to leave Vietnam, but grumbling kids got what they wanted in a few days.

Feedgate obviously doesn’t match the significance of the Vietnam War protests, but it revealed something important: young people aren’t as indifferent as we seem.

Parents, sociologists and old farts across the country say the Facebook Generation (anyone currently 18-25) is apathetic and self-absorbed. Our protest of Facebook and relative silence as people our age are killed in Iraq bodes well for that assumption. But the uproar caused by News Feed illustrates that we too have a fiery, defiant streak. It may rarely come out, but it's there.


When News Feed went live, angered students responded immediately and demanded that it be shut down. They started online petitions that garnered 700,000 signatures and joined groups with names like “AAAA! Facebook is Stalking Me!”

News Feed didn’t reveal anything that wasn’t already public, but many of Facebook’s 9.5 million users saw it as the biggest invasion of privacy since Bush’s domestic wire-tapping scandal. Knowing that the site compiled everyone's activities into a neat little package for friends to track other friends was too much for my pal Linette to handle. She contemplated deleting her account and wondered, “What’s up with the new Facebook [being] all in my face?”

The complaints and threats of a boycott became widespread. Like CEO’s usually do in a PR nightmare, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberger responded to the uproar by apologizing for his company's digital molestation. Days after News Feed was introduced, Zuckerberger issued this statement:

When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now…

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

The chaos following News Feed shows that young people are capable of invoking change. No, we’re not marching on Selma to fight prejudice or picketing LBJ to bring the boys home. Hell, most of us wouldn’t know how to make a picket sign if our life depended on it.

But we aren’t lazy demons as older generations would have you believe. We’re willing to oppose invasions of privacy – regardless of how valid the perception may be – just like our parents were. We’re willing to voice our opinion and use the power of organized criticism. An Internet company isn’t as distinguished a target as the CIA or FBI, but the basic anger and sense of injustice is there. Millions of young people felt like someone intruded on their personal space and they responded the quickest way they knew how – using the Internet.

Technology allows college students to do new things and protest in ways that weren’t available decades ago. Actually, we do it in ways that weren’t even available a few years ago. When the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah escalated this summer, young people turned to the Internet. It was an ever-present link for millions of individuals who wanted to join with others in their community (or the world) and do something to end the crisis. Some joined groups on Facebook to protest or support Israel’s bombing of Lebanon. Others used MySpace groups to organize demonstrations and create online petitions to urge the United Nations to intervene.

Thousands of MySpace users even held an online peace vigil by simultaneously displaying the same image of a candle in their profiles. Organized by a 15 year-old girl in Dallas, the vigil became an international symbol of protest for young people troubled by their homeland being destroyed. The girl probably saw it as a way to offer emotional support to people in need, but the project has become a lasting sign that you don’t need large public demonstrations to have your voice heard.

Remember, folks: the First Amendment right to assemble peacefully isn’t exclusive to city hall. Many in the Facebook generation spend a large amount of time on the Internet, and it’s natural that we would use it to promote a cause. We grew up knowing more about America Online than American history, so don’t be surprised that we employ new tactics to achieve our goals. Previous generations should learn to respect the creative use of technology because when we run the world, digital defiance will be standard. Not to sound cocky, but we're an advanced generation.

Wait a second. I just logged into my Facebook account and discovered something disturbing: there are dozens of groups now supporting News Feed. Crap. I just spent all this time trying to dispel one notion about our generation and people have confirmed a different one. We may not be apathetic, but we damn sure are fickle.