Eliza, “The Schuyler Sisters”, Hamilton
Look around, look around at how Lucky we are to be alive right nowLast night I watched a Congressperson use his phone to livestream a protest from the well of the US House of Representatives after the Speaker of the House killed the official cameras.
When the cameras came back on, and the Periscope stream stopped, I had to search around to find a place to watch the official stream on the Internet as I don’t have cable, but I eventually found it.
Part of my generation’s expectations are that we demand the primary sources. Give me the actual speech, not the editorialized sound bites on the 6 o’clock news. Let me listen to the actual audio of a longass boring public meeting to find out why my city council expressly wanted cars to park in the bike lane. Let me choose to watch the raw footage of gun violence so that I can feel the human outrage and horror that I should be feeling.
Everything Congress does is political theater, but at least I live in an age where there’s less centralized control over which scenes I get to watch.
