“Can you name one current political leader in Africa? South America? Asia?”  When my junior year history teacher posed this question to the class, I was absolutely stumped. Here I was, already planning to major in Political Science, and I could not think of a single name that would suffice. In fact, not a single person in my class could come up with an answer to the question. I wish I could say I went home after school that day and began a mission to learn about international politicians, but I was a lazy high school student and probably ended up just taking a nap.

So, two years later, I saw the passion blog assignment as a great opportunity to educate myself on the global politics, as well as hopefully helping others learn some new things. In today’s political climate, it is all too easy to lose sight of what’s happening outside our borders. Instead of working on educating the public, the media attempts to obtain viewership by turning current events into a spectacle. It only takes a Donald Trump tweet to grab the attention of major news sources, while we decline to even think about the upcoming elections in Norway, Aruba, Singapore, Germany. I’m not going to pretend I knew about those major events either. But isn’t that a huge problem? As the new generation of our country, shouldn’t we strive to be both national and international citizens?

For the topic of my passion blog, I will be focusing on presenting and detailing the politics and politicians of a specific nation in each post: the type of government, its limitations, and various current events that might be occurring. I feel that by investigating a variety of different countries around the globe, I can diversify my knowledge and more fully understand the role politics plays in our lives.