The Political Whore

By Alexandra Koutsogiannopoulos
PoHo Contributor
Alex is the program director for the United Nations Association-USA’s Tampa Bay Chapter and will be an occasional guest on the Political Whore podcast.

I thought that my first post on here should be an introduction to me: who I am, where I came from and why you should give a damn….!

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. First generation Greek-American, both of my parents immigrated to the United States individually: my father came here after completing medical school in Greece and my mother came here when she was still in elementary school when her parents came here to start a new life.

I stayed in Ohio only for four years before my parents loaded up the Toyota and drove down to Florida where all the other relatives had moved to. Greek families tend to move in herds…like wildebeests…and when one of them finds a new spot to “graze” the rest of the herd follows. We ended up in Orlando, in a community which was all cow pasture and roads going nowhere: Hunter’s Creek. In the past 6 years or so the area has boomed into a huge Westchase-eque type area.

Besides growing up in a highly pre-packaged, tourist-industry based city I also spent a large majority of my time growing up in Arkasa, Karpathos, Greece. And although their industry is also heavily dependent on tourism I was exposed to quite a different way of living and to the people who would visit there from around the world and their point of views. So although when I was in the United States I was typing on my Casio Dear Diary, sending letters to President Clinton about animal testing and pretending I was Rogue while playing make believe X-men games with my friends- I also was running through the streets at all hours of the day, raising goats, sheep and kittens in a tiny village where literally EVERYBODY knows your name…your family…your entire genealogical history….so let’s just say you had to be VERY careful about what you did and where you went and with whom you made friends with OR you just completely rebelled against all of it and didn’t give a crap because either way it got back to your parents….villages are a great way to practice personal politics and to learn about how to handle your own public relations dilemma’s. Try doing damage control when the six old women who hang out on the balcony and gossip just found out a juicy tidbit about you….it ain’t easy.

Besides that I moved away from home to Tampa for college, where I took a bunch of environmental policy, international relations, philosophy and psychology courses and have been living here going on seven years. I have interned for the Sierra Club, working under Darden Rice, and for the gubernatorial campaign for Jim Davis. I also interned for the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute in Athens, which is the only nonprofit organization in Greece that keeps track of the dwindling cetacean populations there. I have worked for Bank of America, WUSF 89.7 FM, Side Splitters Comedy Club and two real-estate law firms.

I pride myself on trying to keep as up-to-date on international events as on national/state/local. I am of the belief that no event occurs without immediate global affects whether you see it right away or eventually. And it is from this that I  feel that although tensions rise as the population of the globe increases and habitable places to live dwindle- ultimately the decisions that will be made by the world’s great deciders will tend to be more towards peace than towards violence. We will constantly walk on the precipice between destroying ourselves and creating a (relatively) peaceful world. But-as was stated by Agent Smith in the Matrix-we would probably “reject the programming” if the world was perfect and utopian. Oh and did I mention I’m a gamer? That’s a major hobby of mine, in addition to the politics. I think that massive multiplayer online gaming is really going to change the “Z” generation and how they feel more part of a global community rather than a national one. When you spend more time talking to a person living in Ireland than your next door neighbor, it can change the way you look at things. But I digress…thank you for tuning in. kkthxbai! ^^

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