Month: October 2011

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Events, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

This morning, a reporter posted a query on HARO (a free service that matches reporters with story sources) asking,

Were you a protester/activist back in the 1960s? If so, what's
your reaction to the current Wall Street protest and the
off-shoots around the country?

I thought my response was worth sharing with a wider audience:



Hi, Sondra, I went to my first demonstration about the Vietnam war in 1969 and was very active in protests all through the 1970s and beyond. I was arrested at Seabrook in 1977, committed civil disobedience but was not arrested at the Wall Street Acton in 1979, was a peacekeeper for the million-person march for peace in 1982. I probably still attend three to five demonstrations in a typical year, mostly local (Western Massachusetts) –but I did go to massive demos in Washington and NYC to try to keep us out of Iraq in 2002-03. Also, using other methods than street demonstrations, I have been an active organizer for decades. My biggest success was forming a group called Save the Mountain, which generated widespread community support and blocked a particularly horrible housing proposal next to a state park–after all the “experts” said there was nothing we could do.


As it happens, today I’m getting on a bus for an evening conference on sustainability in NYC, and staying over for the night. Tomorrow morning my plan is to go to Wall Street and see how things are going.


As a teenager, I had a poster in my room with a picture of a peace demonstration and the caption, “It is a sin to be silent when it is your duty to protest –Abraham Lincoln”–and I guess that pretty much sums up my feeling.


Obama has been a very weak president, falling short on issue after issue about bringing the “change” he was elected to create. He has given us a slower–and in some cases faster (like drone killings)–version of the “new normal” that developed under the illegal government of George W. Bush. No one has even been indicted for the crimes against the people by the Bush government or by the looters in suits in the financial industry. I believe strongly in the power of nonviolent protest, and am thrilled to see a new generation stepping forward, willing as we were to disrupt their lives in order to make a difference. Street protest is certainly not the only approach, and I believe we need multiple simultaneous nonviolent approaches. The country has gotten so topsy turvy and out of balance that I don’t think Richard Nixon would be tolerated by the Republican Party anymore (he’s probably to the left of Obama, if you watch both men’s actions rather than their words), and even their ‘sainted’ Reagan would be too far left to be nominated today. We desperately need an effective Left in this country, and the Occupy movement is stepping up, even if it has not figured out yet how to articulate its mission and goals.

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Hooray for Antioch College, an education innovator all the way back to its founding in 1850, when it became the first college to admit women and men, blacks and whites, all as equals.


The college, which just reopened after being closed for several years and separating itself from Antioch University, is taking its golf course (which had been disused even during my student days in the 1970s and turning it into a farm that will both supply food to the campus and provide a framework for integrating hands-on sustainability into the curriculum.


Bravo!

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In the South Bronx, once a deeply distressed urban area of New York City that the cops had dubbed “Fort Apache” because it had been so dangerous, a lot of the comeback has been around sustainability (thanks in no small measure to years of terrific organizing by Majora Carter and Sustainable South Bronx). A new initiative I just learned about creates three wins at once:


    

  • Cleans up polluted water
    • 

  • Creates clean and usable biofuel that doesn’t sacrifice agricultural land
    • 

  • Creates jobs and a general economic boost in a depressed area
    • 



Read about this triple win here. More and more, I think we’ll be seeing development projects like this. (I know of many others around the country and around the world.) The key is to look at waste from one process and see how it could be used as an ingredient for the next process. Another great example is The Intervale, in Burlington and South Burlington, Vermont, where beer waste becomes a growing medium for mushrooms, which in turn feeds fish. This thinking shift is one of the major principles of true sustainability.

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Overlisting people for Follow Friday and its many genre-specific siblings on other days of the week has polluted Twitter–too often, you click on a profile and see nothing but undifferentiated lists of people to follow. This does no good for the people making the lists, and hardly any good for those mentioned.


But naming people to follow is still a useful thing when done right. I’ve added many followers by checking out some of these folks and following them. Typically, each week, I’ll pick one person’s list that mentions me, and visit the other people mentioned.


There are, of course, many ways do “do it right.” Here’s what works for me, personally; your solution may look different.


When I do my #ff (and my eco-Monday), I list several in one tweet with a couple of keywords, such as “humor” or “green marketing.” With hundreds of people on my list to spotlight for Follow Friday or Eco-Monday, I keep a document in my email program that groups them by category in batches of 140 characters or less and also lists the dates I mentioned them. Here’s an example:




[1/8/10, 7/11/11] Green-3 @billmckibben @zerofootprint @greenbucket @Greenopia @gosner @greenmarketing @MarcalSmallStep @greenforyou




So in this case, this is the third batch of green contacts (out of 36 so far–yeah, I need to make an official Twitter list), which I posted in January 2010 and repeated in July 2011. All I have to do is scoop up the part after the dates and pop it into Twitter, then add the next date in the brackets. 114 characters, eight people recommended, and I’m done until the next time. If it’s an Eco-Monday post, I won’t label them “green,” because it’s obvious. On Follow Fridays, I try to always give some clue abut why I follow these folks.


But here’s the thing–I do *one* #ff tweet and one #ecomonday tweet per week, and I post plenty of other useful content during Fridays and Mondays.


Then I come back and say thank you to anyone who has #FFd me (or retweeted, mentioned my book, etc.)–but I do it as Thanks for the #ff, and that way it’s clear that I’m saying thank you and not necessarily endorsing them.


I skip pages that are nothing but long lists of people to follow. BORING! They’ve lost their chance for me to follow them back if that’s all I see when I visit.


Yes, this does annoy a few people who like to be on my list every week. There’s at least one prominent marketer who used to #FF me each week, but I only #FFd back once in a while. She stopped. But at the moment, I have 583 people on my #FF list, and that number is always growing; I’d be foolish to post them all at once every week. It’s not about ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine,’ but about another way I can be a useful resource for my own followers while keeping a Twitter profile that people actually want to read. And event hough she hasn’t listed me in a year or so, that marketer still shows up on my list every once in a while.

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I’ve been an Apple user since I got my first Mac in 1984. One of his greatest contributions was to make computers much more accessible to non-geeks. It would have been a lot longer learning curve on a pre-windows IBM PC or even an Apple II. MacWrite 1.0 and WYSIWYG [what-you-see-is-what-you-get—a major innovation in computers at that time] completely revolutionized the way I wrote resumes, which were my major service line at the time (and which I still do, occasionally)–plus made it much easier to develop template documents, etc. Four of my eight books started as earlier books. In 1979, I turned in the MS for my first book, which was a co-authored rewrite of a much older book–with pieces of the original book spliced into my typed out pages with scissors and tape. The other three were all upgraded from books I’d written earlier after getting a computer (one of them on that original 1984 machine)l it was SO much easier!


And just this summer, I found a new use for one of Jobs’ newest technologies: Using an iPad with the seaprate Apple wireless keyboard, I can type to my deaf stepfather while he holds the screen and reads what I’m saying in real time. Much better than passing a laptop back and forth or shouting in his ear.


Thank you, Steve Jobs, for the many innovations that have made the world brighter and made my personal life easier.


For more on Jobs’ life and legacy, among the thousands of articles out there, this one on the Macworld site is quite good.

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1. Listen before you talk.


2. Share advice and resources at least 8 or 10x as often as you self-promote.


3. Be friendly, helpful, and interesting; provide useful and accurate information that builds people’s trust in you.


4. Amplify your message across different channels, but only in ways that make sense and don’t annoy.


5. Reach out to others, both individually and in groups (as appropriate).


Using these rules, I’ve grown my business more from social media (all the way back to 1995) than anything else I’ve ever done to market my writing and marketing/publishing consulting services, and have also sold a fair number of books and other information products.

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