As much as I know I was an unbearable asshole at that point in my life, sometimes I miss my late teens/early twenties. You know, that time when, particularly if you grew up in a backwoods area (I did) and you head to college, and you start meeting people who think like you and are introduced to all sorts of new ideas, and you proceed to act like you're the first person who ever thought about things in a certain way and you talk about it incessantly, because YOU NEED TO MAKE PEOPLE SEE.
Never mind that pretty much every person you know has already gone through that phase, come out the other side, realized they don't know shit, and are just humoring you as you get into heated debates about things you really know nothing about, like Vietnam or health care. Now I realize that there are no easy answers, and for every person whose life is improving, someone else is taking it to the face. This whole Egypt thing has certainly reminded me of that. Part of me likes that people had just had enough oppression, and banded together to say "Enough." And another part of me sees people getting hurt, thinks about stability in an already volatile region, and wonders if the protestors do succeed, if what follows will be even worse. It's played out that way before.
I'm kind of amazed by the role social media has had in all this. Debate the causes all you want, but social media is making people more aware of basic human rights. I like to bitch about texting, facebook, and Twitter, even though I use two of the three, and how they're making kids obnoxious and people unable to interact-but let's face it, the internet and all its various offspring have opened up a whole new world to isolated people in isolated nations. They're learning things they never could before, and saying things they wouldn't have dared. I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg or whatever the hell his name is imagined that his site would play a role in the overthrowing of a government when he was sitting in that dorm room at Harvard.
Wonder if he's shitting his pants realizing it now. I know I would be.
Yeah, I know this isn't a mom topic but like all moms, I do other things, and only ten people read this anyway, some of whom are contractually obligated by marriage or blood to still like me, and others who for some reason think I'm funny, so hopefully I can branch out some and not piss anyone off. Or lose my ads. I have one for Mormonism. I'm not entirely sure how that happened. Using me to advertise for Mormonism is like using a baseball blog to advertise for Sex in the City 3-Sassy Continence Management for Old Whores.
I suppose you could consider me to fall into the "contractually bound" category, but I found this to be an interesting winding road of ideas.
ReplyDeleteFacebook and Twitter when helping with isolated countries is one thing -it's because we, as Americans, are already so socially "advanced," we're seeing how this service can be taken for advantage of.
Maybe sometime soon, Egyptians will be rolling their eyes, their heads ducked at the dinner table, "liking" their friends statuses as their actual friends talk over them - rather than planning out the next government attack.
-leslie