Saturday, May 25, 2013

The revolution is just a tweet away

I originally published this blog in February 2011. In light of my renewed interest in blogging, online marketing and all things digital, I'm giving it a second life.

What if the protesters at Kent State had had Twitter in 1970 … would four students have died? As America enters what could be a new era of civil unrest, I find myself wondering what role social media will play.

For people who haven’t been following events in Wisconsin, the new governor there, Scott Walker, has introduced a budget that he says is necessary to keep the state fiscally afloat. In reality, Walker’s goal is to kill the public sector unions by taking away many of state workers’ collective bargaining rights. Since the budget was introduced on February 11, it has set off a wave of peaceful protests in Madison, the state capital, that has grown day by day, week by week. The crowds that have gathered – sometimes camping overnight – say this is about much more than their health insurance and pensions. They say this fight is over the very future of the American worker.

So what do the protests in Wisconsin have to do with Kent State? Well for one thing, at least one person has called on the government to disperse the crowds with live ammunition. That man, Jeffrey Cox, the deputy attorney general of Indiana, posted the comment as a tweet on his Twitter account. He has since been fired for his remarks, but imagine if things had gone differently … what if his comment had kindled anti-union sentiment among members of the Wisconsin government? People are bringing their families to these protests. Can you imagine the chaos if National Guard soldiers began firing indiscriminately on the protesters? It makes comparisons between Madison and Kent State downright scary.

Of course Cox isn’t the only one using Twitter to comment on the Wisconsin protests. Just a quick search shows a handful of Twitter feeds devoted to the subject (@tlists1/wisconsin-labor-protests
claims to be the most listed tweeters about Wisconsin Labor Protests). Ranging from discussions of the governor admitting his anti-union agenda and thoughts of planting troublemakers in the crowd during a prank call to evidence of similar budgets in other states falling by the wayside the Twittersphere is abuzz with news from the protests and the ripple effect they’re having across the country.

Cox’s firing doesn’t solve anything with this budget crisis. And all the tweets in the world may not be enough to embarrass the governor into backing down on his union-busting budget. But it does highlight the power of social media to affect political discourse. If Americans think only people in Mideastern countries can harness the power of social media to bring about change, Wisconsin might just be a wake-up call.

The social side of serious illness

I originally published this blog in December 2010. In light of my renewed interest in blogging, online marketing and all things digital, I'm giving it a second life.

There was a time, not so long ago, when terminal illness was a personal thing. If you had cancer the people close to you knew – your family, your coworkers, your friends, your church – but the knowledge stopped there, close to your inner circle. Now, with Facebook and Twitter, everyone’s life is an open book – and that includes their cancer. The question is, does social media make it easier or more difficult to deal with terminal illness?

This question has special poignancy to me because of a little girl I never ever met. Her name was Lucy, and she was diagnosed earlier this year with a rare form of brain cancer. She and her sister attended the child care center where my daughter works, which is how I came to know about her story. All through the summer and fall the family kept everyone who wanted to follow Lucy’s progress updated via something called The Caring Bridge, which I think is basically a blog set up by the hospital where Lucy was being treated. Through ups and downs, progress and setbacks, the family kept everyone apprised of Lucy’s condition.

While the family blogged and cared for their daughters, the community around Lucy grew. Team Lucy – made up of everyone from Lucy’s immediate family to complete strangers like me – participated in Kansas City’s Head for the Cure 5K last summer. A smaller group joined the Lawrence, KS version of the same 5K. More recently, my daughter and I attended a fundraiser for Lucy at Hamburger Mary’s. It was bingo night, and all the proceeds from the evening went toward Lucy’s skyrocketing medical bills. I was happy to give what little I could and grateful that I’d never had to hold a similar fundraiser for any of my children.

I guess all of these walks and fundraisers could have happened without Facebook and the blog, but I don’t think they would have had as big a response. The details the family posted online made everyone feel like they were part of the team rooting for that little girl, and the more dire her situation became it seemed like everyone fought even harder for a happy ending.

Sadly, Lucy lost her battle with cancer the weekend before Thanksgiving. The family is still posting their story online, albeit with much less frequency now. I guess it’s hard to let go of that grassroots community that sprung up around their little girl. Maybe some of the relationships they’ve forged will live on in her memory. I know my daughter will never forget Lucy, and even though I never met her, neither will I.

Not everyone can or wants to make their battle with cancer as public as Lucy’s family did, but I guess at least in this instance, social media helped a family cope with their grief.

Requiem for a mosquito

I originally published this blog in August 2010. In light of my renewed interest in blogging, online marketing and all things digital, I'm giving it a second life.

The weirdest thing happened yesterday. I watched a mosquito die. And I felt sad.

I first noticed the little bloodsucker flying around my office window, trying in vain to break free. “Oh great,” I thought, “it probably bit me.” I thought about squishing it against the pane of glass but then I remembered a conversation I had with a friend recently in which we both professed our disdain for killing living things. I guess that includes mosquitoes too. Now if one is biting you, my friend said, that’s considered a karmic push and you’re justified in pushing back. But I hadn’t seen this particular bug latched on to me anywhere, so I left him to his futile buzzing.

This is how boring my day was – I kept checking back to see whether the mosquito had flown away or whether he was still in my midst. That’s when I noticed he’d stopped flying and was just sitting on the sill. “He’s not even going to make a move for me,” I thought. "Silly mosquito. Food is just a few feet away and you’re calling it quits."

I checked back in on my bug friend a few more times, but he stayed in place. Still twitching a leg now and then, but no longer flying. Then it dawned on me: he’s sitting there waiting to die. It’s weird, but I actually felt sorry for him. I couldn’t help thinking how horrible it must be to starve to death or die of thirst – I’m not sure which of these was his fate. Maybe the clock had just run out on him and he had nothing left to do but wait to stop breathing.

Is that what death is like? Or more accurately, is that what life is like? Sometimes I think so. On those days when I’m home alone with plenty of things to do but no motivation to do them, am I just sitting there waiting to stop breathing? Will anyone notice me in my final hours? Or will I sit on the window sill, wings still, waiting for the inevitable?

I came into the office this morning, and sure enough, the mosquito was still sitting in my window, though now he was officially dead. No rigor mortis, no comic-style legs up in the air, just complete inertia. I slid a piece of paper underneath him and deposited him in the trash so I wouldn’t keep looking at him all day. But it didn’t matter; I kept thinking about him anyway. He didn’t die via a deadly swat, but on his own terms, in his own time. All in all not a bad way to leave this world. When it’s my turn I hope fate affords me the same luxury.