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Urgency
There's no good way to start this essay so I'm just gonna hit the ground running...
Last week I was diagnosed with cancer. It’s an intense feeling to be 23 and knowing you might not see 24 and that the outcome isn’t so much in your hands as it is you’re just gonna have to wing it. Everybody tells me to think positive and I’m trying, but there are going to be good days and bad days and I’m not good at lying to myself so there’s no sense in cre. I cried a few times the first day but it was a relief, too; at least I finally knew what I was dealing with. I’d been in the hospital for a couple weeks with tons of symptoms but no diagnosis, so having hard facts and a course of action was a welcome development, even if it was the C-word.
I got the news on Wednesday. I started chemo on Friday and finished the first round on Sunday. I was tired on Monday and Tuesday. Today I walked around outside for awhile and it was great. The weather is all grey and dreary but fresh air of any kind is a beautiful thing when you’re stuck inside virtually 24/7. Later my little brothers visited and I saw my mom and dad in the same room for the first time in years. It’s been quite an emotional rollercoaster. I’ve learned a lot in a short time, about myself, other people and life in general.
a book about facebook organizing
I had this idea a month ago to write a handbook to Facebook organizing. I thought, hey, why not? It could be useful to some folks, plus I have the luxury of unemployment right now. Maybe make this 50 page thing and post it here or get it published, then I'll go land some real writing gigs again.
Anyway, why I'm posting this is because in the course of the writing, I've come up with a lot of ideas to help Lose the Label and launch other projects. I'll be trying some of them out, spending way too much time online, and writing about it a lot. Basically being a mad political scientist, and in the nerdiest ways imaginable. Please mind the crap.
Labels for slave labor produced goods (a.k.a., Wal Mart's worst nightmare)
What if on every product produced in factories that pays their workers two cents an hour or something, there was a label on the packaging that said, “Inspector general’s warning: This product may have been produced by slave labor.”?
Like the same deal as with cigarettes, except it’s a public service for a moral, not a health issue. It'd be like giving a scarlet letter to all the companies treating people like shit.
Products that rise above a certain standard would be allowed to not have the label. For example, most American-made products wouldn’t have to carry it because the majority of our workers are not mistreated. Where the line could be drawn is debatable, but it's just be nice to have an explicit, obvious way to identify the worst offenders.
Apathy is the New Fascism
The United States is the most powerful country on Earth. Our military is huge and our politicians send it anywhere they please. Our corporations are some of the largest private companies to exist in all human history. Some of the greatest artists, scientists, writers, musicians and inventors of all time are Americans. We were the first colony to rip off the chains of imperialism.
We now place the same chains on others.
The United States of today perpetrates the same crimes on the rest of the world as the Europe of centuries ago. We’re ruled by a partnership of corporations and politicians willing to destroy liberties and lives in order to maintain their power. How long we’ve been this way is unclear, but when I look at the things we’ve done lately --- like choosing to topple a sovereign government in Iraq, eagerly purchasing mass goods made by sweatshop labor in the Third World, blocking action on global warming --- I see a nation that’s completely betrayed its founding ideals. We do to the rest of the world what the British did to us: exploit without shame.
A Plan
How about this?
We make some amazing t-shirt designs to raise money and put it in a fund for new projects. We then announce an activism entrepreneur contest. People post their ideas on Lose the Label and the community decides which ones to fund. We can promote the contest on Facebook (through notes, and a group we invite a ton of people to), the blogs (I can make some posts announcing it, and maybe we can afford some banner ads), YouTube, Digg and whatever else we can think of.
We could repeat this project a bunch of times and probably expand it, too.
Living Activism
I make a lot of posts about current events that turn opinionated toward the bottom, where I usually rant that the solution is for us to be more active, engaged citizens. I want to take a minute to expand on that.
Every problem within our broken system has its own set of solutions, but one facet to every solution is more people taking a more active role in the decision process. This means first educating yourself enough to have a strong opinion and then taking the time to back it up with action --- on Election Day, using your vote, or on every other day, using the 1st Amendment. When a lot of people do it over one problem, pressure for a solution follows. This is called “progress”.
People often look to leaders for this, but I think that’s a mistake. The only thing a leader can do is direct a bunch of followers to behave a certain way, and only in the short term and only over one issue at a time. It’s like the old analogy --- give a man a fish and he’ll eat tonight, but teach a man to fish and he’ll never go hungry. I think activism is the same way. Better to learn the trade and reuse it over and over again, applying it to a wide variety of situations, instead of pinning your hope on a leader who may or may not do what you want later on.
Idiot proof general strike plan
Here's a step by step description of how we can stage a massive antiwar strike using Facebook. Yes, really. I think our target number should be 130,000 because that's the number of troops stuck in Iraq right now, plus it's much easier to reach than the original goal of 250k.
FIRST STAGE: Getting to 130,000
Step One: ASSEMBLE CORE. Build group of 30 core organizers/recruiters. Have it on Facebook so more people can easily join later.
Step Two: CREATE MAIN GROUP. Create Facebook group with a catchy description, simple demands, and a link to the organizers group.
Step Three: LAUNCH. All 30 core organizers invite 100+ friends to group, AND each convince at least 5 friends to invite 50 of their friends. ("Chain invite" -- remember?)
Step Four: NURTURE GROWTH. Make posts advertising strike group on the walls of liberal groups all over Facebook.
And hopefully this creates explosive growth. If it doesn’t, we try other tactics, or pull the plug, or go at a smaller level (50k?). We make decisions like this by posting discussion threads on Lose the Label, which should be the planning area because we have control here; no worries about trolls or interference from Faceb$k administrators. We can also do more with email here.
Student Strike Against the War?
If we do this, no halfassing it.
At the end of the meeting, right as everybody had to go, we
came up with a concept for how to implement the strike idea on a national scale
with a student focus. I thought about it, wrote it up and here's what I got.
Facebook would be our main organizing tool and we’d get
fancy with it. We start of by creating 1 Facebook group, which for now I’ll
call “If this group reaches 250,000, we strike against the war”. The group
description says something like, “Join this group if you commit to
ditching class 7 days after this group reaches 250,000 members. Our only demand
is that Congress defund the war so the troops start coming home NOW. If this
demand is not met and the group makes it to 250,000, we commit to this small
act of resistance.”