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Chaos Creates Opportunity, but Doing the Right Thing Makes a Difference

Some eld ago, my daughter and I raised money to send books to schools in Kenya and Tanzania. We were able to send about a quarter of a million dollars worth of books to a few boys and girls schools in those countries. That is where it began.

Thereafter, we matured relationships with a former president of a fortune 500 consort who built hospitals and clinics. Along the way, he continuing to cater schools, paying for students to go to college, erected industrialized chicken coops, purchased items same tractors for tea farms, furniture and much more.

Back in Dec in a post on the Open Government Directive (link at end of article), social media expert Steve Radick wrote, "The rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship are changing, and we [government practitioners] need to be educated-at every level-on how and why to engage finished open government channels." This resonated with me: What does citizenship countenance like in the age of the internet? What new citizen "duties" are emerging on the social web?

When I think of citizenship on the web, it is not in the conventional "national citizen" sense. Rather, citizenship takes on a broader, and perhaps equally important, meaning: internet citizens ("netizens" as archangel Hauben dubbed us) are grouping who hit a stake in the evolving noesis and case of the web.

Can you believe all the plug around aid reform? I'm not conversation most the beatific clog that's in the aid bill. I'm conversation most the grotesque behavior that is often disguised as patriotism. What is with the prejudiced and homophobic commentary in 2010! Really makes you kind of astonishment if folks are in the streets walking because they care most aid improve or because they are fueled by a passionate hatred...of whom or what, Lord only know.

Protest in America is a wonderful thing as long as protestors do so in a civil manner. Yet for some reason, folks see compelled to perform for the media and behave same jackasses...spitting, cursing, and spreading heinous untruths most aid reform... just for attention??? Or is it something deeper within our democratic culture that brings to the surface, during hard times, these unfortunate displays of grotesque civil rebelliousness all in the name of aid reform.