Imagine you walk into a doctor’s office. You step on the scale and you see a number. The doctor writes a number twenty pounds lighter. He feels your arm and randomly writes a good score for your blood pressure. Confused, you ask the doctor what’s going on.

Times right now seem really stressful to the class of 2011, and I mean both of them: the one that is graduating college in May (of which I am a member), and also the one graduating high school and currently picking where they will call home.

When Americans demand bipartisan solutions from their partisan legislature, Congress must do more than take bipartisan dates to the State of the Union; Congressmen from different parties must move in together. During last week’s State of the Union, Members of Congress broke with tradition of sitting with their parties and sat with people across the aisle.

During the midterm elections, Republicans criticized Democrats for ignoring America and promised the electorate that they would listen to their opinions. However, Republican actions in the lame duck session on the START treaty, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Bush tax cuts, show that they care more about scoring political points against President Obama than what the American people think.

Israel remains a strategic asset to America, making a strong US-Israel relationship critical to American success. When determining the benefits to the United States of a diplomatic relationship with another country, one must look at the benefit the relationship has on American civilian, military and diplomatic goals, as well as the reliability of ally.

We have a choice. Every two years, America votes for the people it will send to the House of Representatives.

While the passage of health care reform makes significant changes, the new heightened level of public discourse is the more dangerous change in our country. Health care reform will change our nation in major ways. According to the Congressional Budget Office, health care reform will cut the deficit by $1,300,000,000,000. It will ensure that 32,000,000 more people will have health insurance.

Ideological compatibility is essential for representation, but citizens should care about more results than principles. Representatives of varying ideological backgrounds make up Congress, making for an entertaining and often-frustrating political process. Small-government conservatives, self-identifying socialists and everyone in between work together to pass a budget.

The myth of a self-made man, an individual who rises to great success purely from his own talents, wrongly remains the center of the ideologies of various conservative movements. At this past weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, this myth took a prominent role in the right’s criticism of the current government.

College students have short attention spans. You do not need to sit behind a guy on his laptop during a class to figure it out. We struggle to pay attention to things large and small, but some things need to be given attention. Better stay on top of calculus, or your class will be doing derivatives while you draw doodles.