iLiza's eyes

I had a morning utilizing Facebook as a tool for grassroots organizing. I was trying to get the word out that my boss, Gloria Feldt (past president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America), had an Op Ed in the New York Times today.

It started with a minor panic attack. I got up at 10AM with an email from 8:30AM from Gloria with a link to the article and a "please get the word out about this" request. The immediate feeling that I would fail consumed me--how was I supposed to start an entire campaign around this article in two hours? How do I get people to care?

My roommate was the one who gave me some ideas about how to use Facebook, and by 12:30 I felt like I'd spread the article through a network of my peers fairly effectively. About Facebook, my roommate said, "It's such a great organizing tool," and he questioned why people don't use it more often that way.

I question that too; and after my possible success today, I wonder how my generation can be so lazy in taking positive advantage of this unprecedented network of peers. Or rather, I want to look at the lack of action critically, but I can't.

I think my feeling of anxiety when I woke up this morning is closely linked to the feeling of helplessness that people feel when they read stories in the newspaper about Darfur, poverty or human rights violations. It's the same feeling they have when they look at an upcoming election and choose apathy instead of voting for the better of two evils. It's paralysis; it's a sense that maybe it would be easier to pretend it doesn't exist instead of contemplating sorting out the overwhelming mess.

So I have sympathy for that feeling, and for the failure of modern Americans to take initiative, but I don't think it's acceptable. I think that we need to learn to get over that feeling. We need to learn to panic, but then use that energy to dive in, even if we're going to drown. I think that we need to learn to accept baby steps: we need to be okay with the idea that we might extend ourselves and make almost no difference at all, but that even the most basic action can make an impact.

I wish that we would have the courage to do this more often, and especially that my peers would care so deeply about something so as to act on it en mass and encourage its change. I wish our passion matched the capabilities of the tools we have to create this change. And finally, I wish that we would step up to prove that we have that capability ourselves, just like the revolutionary generations before us to demanded the change that they eventually got. Like Margaret Sanger, who Gloria talks about, just to name one.

posted by iliza @ 2:04 PM