To The Left

Welcome to my blog! My name is Sammy Zeino. I’m a student at Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee. Starting this blog has been a goal of mine for quite a while, and now I’ve finally been able to find time to really kick it off. In this first post, I just wanted to provide an introduction to both myself and to the content of my future blog posts. If you want some of my personal information in shorter form, you can check out the “About Me” page of this site. I don’t claim to be an expert in any of the things I plan to discuss, but they are topics that I’m considerably passionate about and interested in learning and debating more in the future.

So, who am I? Well, if you came over here from one of my social media posts, you probably already know me in some form, but I will just provide an overview of myself. As I said before, I’m currently attending Maryville College with a major in political science. I’m a sophomore, and after undergrad, I plan on attending law school. In my own family, I have two older sisters, Peyton and Hilary, and a younger brother, Aiden. Also, I have a wonderful girlfriend of a year and seven months, Ashley. Things I’m interested in include, obviously, politics but also soccer. I have played soccer most of my life, and it is something that is always a good stress reliever(or the opposite). On almost all Saturday mornings, you can find me up early watching my favorite team, Liverpool, playing. Politics is something I really gained interest in during high school, and it is something I’ve continued to follow into college. From debates with my parents to many of my closest friends, I tend to stand quite firm in my beliefs, but I always try to be as objective as possible with a focus on actual policy and not emotional positions. This blog will hopefully be able to provide a forum for both myself and for you, the reader, to understand my views on different topics and provide input through the “Contact” section of this site.

Alright, enough about me, let me give you an introduction to the actual content of my future blog posts. The name “To The Left” is a cheesy play on a Beyonce song, but it also describes my own political leanings. In today’s political climate, many obsess over labels from “Alt-Right” to “Classical Liberal” to “Progressive”. These labels are used in both positive and negative forms. While I do think there seems to be an obsession over labeling, I believe labels are important because they provide people with a view of where you stand on the political spectrum. If I was to label myself, I would align mostly with a leftist viewpoint that includes support for both social and economic justice(very broadly speaking), hence, the title of my site. As I stated previously, I am open to debating my own positions, and I try to do my best to base my thoughts off of evidence over emotion. Well then, what will I be covering in future blog posts? I want to focus this blog on current public policy debates and on electoral politics. Examples of this could range from recent federal court decisions on ObamaCare(public policy) to my opinions on who would be the best candidate to take on Donald Trump in the 2020 election(electoral politics). Alongside these topics, I want to do my best to include more local issues as that is something that I feel I don’t focus enough of my own attention towards. I hope for my posts to be informative on issues that readers might not have a full grasp upon, but I will also be including much of my own perspective toward these topics. By creating this blog, I believe I can both inform but also spark debate on issues that affect almost all of us.

So, how can you help me improve this blog in the future? Firstly, you just reading this is a huge help as it inspires me to continue to put out both interesting and informative content. Alongside reading, you can provide your own feedback in the “Contact” section of this site. Lastly, the most important thing you can do is share this blog to as many people as you can. While it’s nice knowing people who already know me are taking time to read my posts, I would love to expand my audience to others in the future. Every time I post, I will be making sure to send out links on all my social media accounts including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. With this, I will be leaving links to all my social media accounts at the bottom of the post if you would like to follow me on these different platforms if you do not already. Also, on each section of this site, you can find links to all my major social media accounts below the headers. This post is meant to be just an introduction to both myself and the content of the posts, but, in the future, I plan to provide updates to this introduction as I discover new ideas for things I want to cover. To round off this post, I plan for this blog to be an avenue for me to express my thoughts on matters that I find to be engaging. I will work my hardest to make my posts as interesting and evidence-based as I possibly can, and I hope that you, as the reader, can provide me with feedback and share this blog to as many others as possible.