Making a Difference

It would be a lie to say that I’ve become a video pro. I haven’t. But I’ve learned a lot over the past two months, due mainly to my new hobby of filming videos. In fact, I’ve already gone and added Corel Video Studio Pro x2 to the on-line shopping cart right before typing up this blog entry. It may be one of the biggest non-video game computer purchases I’ve made in a long time. After the election, I plan on possibly investing in an even bigger and better camera, one better than my $700 Sony Camcorder, a better microphone for sure, in order to improve what has been started.

Before doing all this I must ask myself if it is, as one person posted on my blog last month, making a difference. I believe it is, it’s just hard to say how much. YouTube thankfully allows a number of options that give you a sense of how often one’s videos are being viewed. A few have gone over 100 views, which in the YouTube world seems paltry, but given how little publicity these have been given, and that our Tribal community is so small compared to the general population, I have to take solace in the fact that somebody is watching them.

To date my brother and I have interviewed 10 of the 18 candidates for Tribal Council this year, including the Chair Cheryle Kennedy. One other incumbent gave me a verbal commitment more than a month ago, while the third has not so much as mentioned it to me. I am starting to wonder if that is deliberate, as in maybe they’ve been “advised” not to participate in this new campaign medium. I say that because at Pow Wow my brother and I spoke to a candidate while in one of the fry bread lines, and this is a candidate who has always been cool to me. But despite our pressuring, she clearly did not want to do an interview, even though all I needed was 30 minutes of her time. I might be reading into this the wrong way, but it just seems kind of odd to turn down what amounts to free campaign publicity with little time commitment. But truth has a way of being stranger than fiction. In the era of partisan politics, sitting down with me might be the equivalent of a Democrat going on Fox News, or a Republican on MSNBC.

Like many things, I look forward to the challenge of sustaining this new hobby after the fervor of the election has died down. Of course, things might get really interesting then.