Originally posted on my brand-new Huffington blog page.In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, proto-human primates circle an ebony monolith from another world, entranced and enraged at the mystery, the otherness, of an object that in one transformative instant brings them technology, war and the power to reach the stars. A lot of the people I meet in the nonprofit world are similarly flabbergasted by the Internet. I'm not saying that nonprofits are stuck in the Paleolithic Era. After military research, advocacy may have done more than anything else to spur the evolution of online tools (with mayhem and disaster running close behind). Most of what I've learned about the Internet over 15 years I've learned from the community of activist techies and thinkers whose commingled DNA now runs through the digital staffs of newsrooms, political campaigns and advocacy organizations. But for every nonprofit Internet guru, or strategist, or 20-something who can…
UPDATE: Was so proud to be part of the Local Voices team. We ran ads in swing counties, in swing states, featuring regular folks from those same counties talking about why Obama is the right choice for working class votes. Plus we won!
First 2012 presidential debate proved that style can matter more than substance and that who won matters more to people than who lied. But the audience has shown up the candidates, the slacking moderator and the pundits with their investment and creativity responding to Mitt Romney's comments about cutting PBS. If only presidential candidates were permitted to put this much humor and passion into their campaigns.
For years and years I've searched for this video, "Free Fallin'," by then Columbia film school student Larry Locke. Base jumper John Vincent tries to make a guerrilla jump off the World Trade Center, despite the risks, the lack of direct access to the edge from the Observation Deck and the security at the top of the tower. This is his story. From 1992. It makes me so happy. I wrote last month--and last year--about the PTSD, fear-porn culture we still live in. I think the hope the country invested in President Obama in 2008, and the joy throughout NYC the night he won, were fueled in part by the hunger for hope itself. The desire, literally, to have something good to stop in the street and talk about. Instead of something terrible. Here's what I wrote that day.