Tatyana Zinger

How to Gain Fewer Enemies and More Friends

Sep 13, 2011 at 2:58 PM

By Tatyana Zinger

When I first met my boyfriend two years ago, he was a mainstream Republican: he loved Bush, listened to Limbaugh, and watched Hannity. We avoided the topic of politics because he thought Ron Paul was an idiot, while I thought the same of Sarah Palin.

He stopped by our 2010 YAL Tax Day Tea Party at SUNY Buffalo, where someone brought up the subject of Palin. Once a YAL member started calling her names, I could feel the atmosphere bubbling over with awkward tension. My boyfriend became defensive when a couple of my friends got on the offense, saying, "So you agree with thousands of innocent Iraqis being murdered?" and other blanket allegations. He got offended at the supposed accusation of American soldiers committing murder, and stormed off.

In the following months, I avoided bringing up the uncomfortable subject of politics between him and me. After enough time passed, I simply provided him with some resources.

Visualize the Debt Tabling at University at Buffalo

Apr 15, 2011 at 10:11 AM

By Tatyana Zinger

The UB Chapter of Young Americans for Liberty had our Visualize the Debt event during the last week of March. Needing to buy a table and other supplies, and with a projected rainy weather forecast, we decided to nix the plywood board idea and go with a "simulation" one. For each of the 14 digits of the debt, we had a booklet with 10 pages. The pages had digits 1-9 on them. Every 15 minutes or so, we would look up the current debt, and flip each of the 14 booklets. Interested passerby were shocked by how much the debt was changing in such short timeframes -- which was the point in our flipbook "Visualize the Debt" idea. At 9 a.m.,the debt was $14,265,648,239,345 (although the last 5 digits don't really matter, since they change every second):

Pre-Tabling Debt Count

We also calculated the fraction of a certain amount of rice that the $100 billion cuts the GOP broposed would bring compared to the actual debt. If only we had known then that they would only end up cutting $38 billion!

Visualize the Rice

We also asked passerby what they would want to cut from the budget, if it was their choice.

SUNY Buffalo Semester Report

Dec 17, 2010 at 8:54 AM

By Tatyana Zinger

The University at Buffalo chapter of Young Americans for Liberty had a melange of compelling activities this semester, from the fun to the fund-raising. To start off the year, we had a tabling event for Constitution Day on September 17th, 2010. Constitutions and liberty-minded literature were handed out to passerby on campus, and interesting discourse was created with people who didn't even know they were libertarian until taking "The World's Smallest Political Quiz."

Me, Pose-Reading