The Writers Guild
One way I think we should group ourselves at LtL is by skillsets, so if someone needs help with a specific aspect of activism, they can ask that group.
This is a group for people whose skill is writing.
If you're a good writer and you'd be willing to volunteer your services to an activist out there in LtL land who needs help sometime, please join this group.
Or, if you're looking for a writer to help you with a press release or some other document, feel free to join or post blogs to this group asking for help and perhaps someone will step up.
Humanity
So let’s imagine the apocalypse. Let’s assume that global warming – to put a contemporary (and highly probable) spin on it – has become irreversible. The climate is fated to change and change and change until the earth winds up, as Stephen Hawking put it, much like Venus— 250 degrees Celsius and raining sulphuric acid. We are doomed from this moment on. It’s a prospect that’s extraordinarily frightening. To face death is one thing. It is a personal struggle, but able to be handled because (and I am speaking for myself here, but I feel that it’s true with most) we have the knowledge that life will go on without us. We may die, but others are born and others live, and then they die, and more still are born, and so on. But death in the face of apocalypse?
All You Artists, Musicians, Writers, and Poets Out There...
...dig on Creative Commons. It's a rather awesome project that sets up a correlary to some contemporary copyright laws.If you dig on the legal aspect of your work, or of artistic work in general, then learn more about the whole shebang here.
Re: Generation Gap -- jakethorn's Offspring post
Okay, so I've been struggling with these things for a long time. The generation gap of the 60's, the generation gap today, activism, etc. My parents used to be major hippies, and whereas I feel my mother has kind of lost touch (yay mercedes! marble bathrooms for all!) my pop is really still in tune with it, and understands my frustration with the current 'way of the world.' I spoke to him at length about the 60's. The few things that hit me (and that I wrote down) went as follows:
Freedom Crap
A great paragraph from a great post on Daily Kos, about the "revolution" of left wing rule in the U.S. The article is part of a community-wide response to a smear campaign Bill O'Reilly has been waging against the popular blog the last couple days.
Genocide 2011
In 2008, President X campaigned on a platform of A, B and C. Never talked much about genocide, except to express anger over Darfur to score points with the base. Never made any serious commitment to “never again,” cause what is that besides a phrase everyone says but no one means?
But now it’s 2011 and yesterday some lurid reports came out of _______. A couple days ago, there were massacres in the north, ___ on ____ violence. A couple villages massacred---the men and boys being immediately executed, women and girls taken out and raped, then executed. Unknown number of dead. Possible government involvement. It appears as a little paragraph in the global roundup sections of major newspapers.
If the rich get dumber, will they get poorer too?
I was browsing Craigslist and came across a post with the headline: Go surf! Give us your paper! You'll have it in time!
If you click through, you get a trashy banner ad. One of the paragraphs reads:
All work is original and is produced from research that is completed by our writers. Every paper or poem is fresh and has not been posted anywhere on the internet. Beware of those ready made term paper sites. Their papers can be caught in the anti-plagiarism software that schools and universities are now using. Meeting deadlines and maintaining excellence are priorities for the team at WriteItRightNow. Let us help you get the grades that you want.
And it just goes on like that. Kinda gross, yeah?
the depth of the problem
We live in a country where apathy has a tight grip on a lot of people. I get annoyed whenever our generation gets singled out, as it affects every demographic, but let’s be honest – we definitely have our share of selfish, ignorant, uncaring dumbfucks walking among us. There are reasons there are so many, something I wrote about in this 2,500 word Daily Kos diary on why college students haven’t been out in the streets yelling at the top of their lungs to stop the war.
I stand by everything I wrote, but I’ve thought about the issue a lot since then, and it’s been around 9 months since I published it, so things have changed, too.