I’ve been spending a decent amount of time on Facebook lately, sending messages, posting on people’s walls, stalk–errr, reading about people, etc.  One thing I’ve been noticing is people’s "political views."  There are eight selections for this category:

  • Very Liberal
  • Liberal
  • Moderate
  • Conservative
  • Very Conservative
  • Apathetic
  • Libertarian
  • Other

I’ll admit that most of my friends tend to lean to the left, but I can still count on my fingers the number of people who have put "Conservative" or "Very Conservative" in their profiles.  Even a lot of the people that I strongly couple with conservative ideology and frame of mind are "Moderate."  This intrigued me to compile some numbers: 

In the RIT network (this includes current students, alumni, staff and faculty with Facebook accounts) the political outlook is:

Politics_1

Innnnnteresting…this begs a number of questions:  Why are there so many "liberal" people?  There are only 102 people that are unabashedly conservative?  This at a tech school full of engineers and IT students!  This where most students’ idea of a good time on a friday night is sitting in their room playing World of Warcraft, drinking Mountain Dew, and locking themselves away from the outside world?

Politics in this country tends to be fairly evenly split between the Democrats and Republicans.  It has been like this for several decades, with the typical pendulum of partisan support gently swinging every decade or so.  Yet these numbers aren’t remotely close to balanced. 

"2008, here we come!" One might think on first glance.  But the problem is, just about everyone represented here is between the age of 18 and 24, and frankly, most of us should jump into that "Apathetic" column.  We don’t speak up, get involved, or even vote!

I believe that these numbers are just part of a trend.  After six years of bullying, fear-mongering, and outright lies, we’re pretty fed up with the man in charge and his administration.  As a nation we finally spoke up in November, and a whole lot of people (GOP’ers included, clearly) are disassociating themselves from the President.  It’s about time, but still, I think all this means is that right now, it’s  just hip to be liberal.