Calvert City, KY (November 4, 2022) – Calvert City’s Youth Voice is a monthly writing contest developed for young authors between the age of 5 and 18. The first of November was the deadline for entries and the winner is Zachary Peek of Louisville, Kentucky.
Calvert Area Development Association used a rubric judging system to choose the November winner. “We received 51 submissions, and they were all wonderful,” said Blair Travis, Director of Marketing, Communications, and Business Development for Calvert City. Judges received the submissions with just the writings. They did not know how old the author was or where they were located.
Zachary is 15 years old and enjoys playing the sax, guitar, and drums. His favorite subject is history.
The next deadline for the monthly writing contest is December 1. Young writers are encouraged to submit original work in any style of creative writing. One winner will be awarded monthly.
Monthly winners will receive $50 and an ad in the Lake News with their published work. The deadline to submit work will be on the 1st of each month. This contest is not limited to Calvert City residents. We encourage writers from across the region to submit their original work.
For more information on Calvert City’s Youth Voice, please call City Hall at 270-395-7138 or by email at info@calvertcityky.gov.
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Mudslinging: Will it Ever Stop?
By Zachary Peek
Just imagine your mailbox and TV being flooded with a bunch of political ads with two politicians dissing each other back and forth. It’s not fun, especially if you’re already having a bad day. This term is called “mudslinging.” This is where people use insults and accusations to damage another person’s reputation. Now, when you look at that definition, it already seems really negative, but when you actually see it on TV or on an advertisement in your mail, it takes it to a whole other level of disrespect for one another. They also don’t look any better when they do this. It makes them look petty.
First of all, who are the people that are doing this? You may ask. The people that are doing this are politicians like Mitch McConnell, Amy McGrath, Donald Trump, and basically almost anyone that runs for political office. Also, they will make up lies sometimes to make the other person sound even worse. They don’t care how low they go to ruin someone’s reputation. “Amy McGrath thinks that burning buildings and looting buildings and companies are a peaceful protest,” Mitch Mcconnell, TV advertisement, 2020. There is no way that she thinks that about the protests. Also, I got a piece of mail today saying that Mitch Mcconnell is a bad idea for Kentucky because of decisions he’s made in the past. It’s in the past, so why can’t the world ever move forward with life? It’s always got to be about how bad someone was twenty years ago, which means apparently they haven’t changed anything at all.
Also, today’s day in age is so negative about everything we do. Kids don’t want to go to school because it’s too boring, and we say we don’t use anything we learn, but we do, and people just don’t notice it. People don’t want to go to work because they’re too tired. We make fun of people because of their skin color and religion and sexual orientation. We try to ruin people’s reputations by spewing lies. It just makes us worse and worse every day. What I’m trying to say is that we don’t need mudslinging in politics. It’s bad for our minds, and most of what they say is taken out of context and is completely not true.
If you look it up, there are laws against lying in TV ads, but that is only for the companies that sell things. Politicians can say anything they really want to about the person running against them. According to an article by Amber Herle, a writer from Brookings, she says, “Political ads by politicians are, by and large, not required to be fact-checked like commercials for consumer products.” This is the reason we hear all of these negative things that don’t sound true about a person, but we believe them anyway because we think that there is no way someone would lie on live television. These people feed us propaganda that our minds don’t need to hear. That’s why we have so many protests all around the world. We say that George Floyd didn’t do anything to resist, but if you research it, you will find that he was on drugs at the time. That doesn’t give the police the right to kill him, but he wasn’t as innocent as everyone thought he was. Long story short, we need to stop believing things about everything we see. Just like, we believe these political ads.
As you can see, people hate to be wrong nowadays. Also, we never admit that we are ever wrong. For example, someone says that another person is crazy, but they are obviously not crazy. So you ask them why, and they just say “Because they are.” They don’t have any evidence to support that the other person is crazy. They also don’t want to admit that they are wrong whenever someone else has evidence that the other person is in fact, not crazy. I witness these types of situations every day. Especially in political advertisements. Just like I said before, these people will say anything so they aren’t wrong. Some politicians advertise that they thought that the burning of buildings and the killing of people was a peaceful protest even though there is no video footage, an article, or a newspaper that says that- it’s obviously not true. I feel that if we actually took a second to think about how absurd something sounds instead of doing our own investigating and researching, we might find that these people are no better than any other liar in the world we live in. It’s pretty obvious that many of the platforms our politicians are not based on the truth, and it’s just filling our minds with unwanted and even dangerous information.
Back to your mailbox, now that you have read and thought about what exactly I had to say; do you really believe that these people who tear each other down should be the ones who you elect as your president, mayor, governor, or whoever you’re voting for to fill that position? We have to do better, people. We only have so many years left on this Earth, so use it wisely, please.