Ideas as Action

As I write this, the protests in Egypt are entering their sixteenth day. For someone who writes, those protestors represent the struggle between thought and action. More and more our lives are lived online. We type to one another. And a well written tweet passes for accomplishment.

These people are doing the very hard work of taking back their government.

It's the kind of thing that makes you a little ashamed. All the upheaval our own country suffered through in the last decade. Maybe if it had lasted for 30 years we'd have found our collective spines and done something. I remember hearing it said, if just one percent of the populace had stood up, roughly 3 million people...just one percent and something would have changed.

I know I know...we've got a new president now and we can put all that ugliness behind us. But it's not behind us. While we take comfort in the gradual recovery they say the economy is undergoing, the next guy is out there biding his time looking to move the ball of oppression just a little further down the field.

And we sit on the sidelines posting blogs and tweets and call that taking action.

Everywhere I look I hear someone talking about making it easier to for people to get involved. Products people can buy where a portion of the proceeds are donated to this charity or that. Ribbons people wear. Donation by text message.

It sounds good right? Easier equals better, right?

Except the more that people come to expect doing the right thing to be easy, the more prone to give up they are when it's not. The fact that people think we need to keep making it easier shows how lazy people are already.

The Egyptian people put the rest of us to shame. They didn't need someone to make it easier for them. Day in, day out for coming up on three weeks now, with no end in sight. Hell, it might even be escalating if the reports I've been hearing are true. Granted the real test will be what comes of all this, but you've gotta start somewhere and they've already exceeded anyone's expectations.

But here I sit writing a blog about people sitting on the sidelines writing blogs. I know you were thinkin' it. The point is though, I know it's not enough. I'm not kidding myself that I'm doing something remarkable here. It's just the start of something.

For a very long time I've known, the world we're living in isn't the best of all possible worlds... but it could be.

That premise is what I'm building on here.