I forgot to watch the State of the Union address last night. Grr. What did I miss?
Stealing a bunch of links from this MetaFilter thread on Alone in the Dark:
• The Filthy Critic
• Defective Yeti
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Uwe Boll
I’ve been troubled lately by thoughts that it seems “freedom” in America only really means “the free market” or that the amount freedom is weighed by the amount of available goods and the ability to buy them.
I’ve also realized that while I possess a rather general sort of abstract wisdom, I’m really not worldly-wise. I don’t know which is more useful, but lack is never useful so I’m going to try to become engaged instead of just sometimes observing the news. I feel like I’m probably guilty of falling into the apathy-trap of American ethnocentrism. I still have so much to learn. This will be good for me, but I don’t know where to start. Any ideas?
The best way to become less apathetic and more action oriented is to find an issue that you are willing to fight personally for, and then do so. Something that affects you, and your life as a person now.
This could mean changing careers, getting together with people who feel the same and then taking action, volunteering, or just reading up more on the history of the subject, so as to see any social implications there might be in the future. Reading and thinking about possible impacts is the first step. Don’t take anything up without knowing the history.
I have found that nothing gets people to move faster than to make them realize that these fights are often right at their front door. It’s hard to be apathetic if that is the case.
I was a page at the statehouse in Indiana. That was only for a day though. Good ideas though folks.
it is so easy to get overwhelmed by the news and politics and information overload. i can’t say i have learned to efficiently parse through it all. but i am involved in my town on a local, more grassroots level. it can frustrating as hell, but also I’ve seen change, too, because of concerned citizens’ banding together. it can be very gratifying and also give you a sense of the world ina way that just reading news does not.
finding something you want to become engaged in is a good idea. you seem interested in the neighborhood in which you live or in the NE Ohio blog scene; those are good starting places.
Really the only way that I can think of for positive change is to run for office. I’m too much of a coward to do so, someday I might have the courage to do so. If you really want to see how to reall make changes, you’ll need to watch and see how the government works at the local and state levels. That means going to city/county/schoolboard meetings and see how the processes work there.
One of the best experiences I had was when I spent several days working with our State Senator in Topeka (this was when I was 16). I got to sit in on committe meetings and work on the senate floor as a glorified gopher. The two things I took away from the meeting: Change can be slow, but for good reason, running a smallish, mostly rural state is more complicated then I had imagined. Local governments have more power to impact our daily lives, but nobody seems to care much about local elections.
I agree about getting involved in the local scene. My brother and some friends started a local advocacy group in Durham, NC (ABCD) and have really gotten some things done. George from Brewed Fresh Daily/Cool Cleveland (who you know, I guess, from the blogger meet up) and Thomas from CoolCleveland are probably good contacts to start with if you want to get involved in changing Cleveland for the better.