civic engagement
One Million Strong Against Hillary reaching One Million
Just a quick note, but the Facebook group "Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary)" is at nearly 975,000 and rapidly closing in on its final goal.
Assuming it makes it before Pennsylvania, it'll make a tiny media blurb. But from a cultural perspective, it'll be a significant one because it'll perfectly exemplify an election-related story that wouldn't have appeared had it not been for a bunch of yokels on Facebook. Therefore, I would argue that participation in the group represents an act of activism. It's electronic engagement replacing in-person engagement, but it's still engagement.
This is one of those subtle examples of participation going on underneath the radar that today's young people rarely get credit for when experts and pundits compare us to generations like the 1960s. It's not a street protest, but it still matters.
Change
Where does it come from? Does it flow from the top or seep up from the bottom? Is it measured by pieces of legislation, or societal benchmarks, or events, or hearts and minds? What causes it? Anger? Hope? Desperation? Fear? You could answer yes to any of these and be right. The fact is that change is a very amorphous concept. It's difficult to define because there are so many types. We've all noticed how Democratic presidential candidates are falling over themselves to prove how much they can bring. They're doing it because it's the message we want to hear; otherwise, they'd emphasize other things, like John Kerry dwelled on Vietnam and George W. Bush constantly tried to scare us. In other words, our demand for change is driving the narrative of this election. This very desire is significant in itself. What's equally significant is how we express it.
No matter what happens with the nomination, we can take comfort how far we've come as an electorate. The incessant fearmongering and lying of the Bush administration didn't numb and dumb the American people into submission; we rebelled, recognized evil when we saw it and are now trying to fix our mistake. We're using new and evolving tools at our disposal, most notably the Internet, which I'd argue has turned from background noise into a driving force.