Venn Diagram That

I was recently at the kick-off event for Borderless, a non-profit organization started by a few kids who aren't sure what they want to do, exactly, but know they want to make the world a better place. They gave me meat they grilled (I think some of it maybe not long enough) and we chatted. There were also some readings done: original poetry, hip hop rhymes, letters from Malcolm X (not to Borderless, specifically, but enlightening nonetheless).

One of the people I met there was a young socialist who volunteers for the party and has been posting flyers in my neighborhood. I tend to think of myself as a socialist (which is why I have ads on my blog, because I can't get a real job, apparently), so the two of us hit it off pretty well, despite his silly bicyclist cap.

Pinstripes. Classy

One of the topics to come up was this year's political uprising in Egypt. You remember, the one that the news stopped covering after, like, a month. Maybe the coverage should have continued, what with all the problems of the military continuing to show what we'll call an excessive interest in things like government and women's viginity.

Even so, the people rising up and demanding a change in government (which has gone so far as to actually jail Mubarak) made my new socialist friend glow a little. He said we need to emulate that sort of activism in our own country and maybe our leaders would listen to us instead of motorbiking all over Creation for what, I'm not sure.

"I love that smell of the emissions!" --Sarah Palin, at a motorcycle rally in Washington, D.C., where she rode in on a Harley, May 29, 2011

A couple days later, I heard another person say he was "proud" of the Egyptians: a Marine. I'm not going to tell you who, since I'm not sure how the government treats people who say things the government may or may not like. But, anyway, he was glad they decided democracy was cool.

America

And that got me to thinking: if a socialist and someone who has been trained, specifically, to kill Commies (they still teach them that) can agree on something, all of us in the middle should listen. Lincoln said, "a universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded." Americans need to disregard their universal apathy, seeing as how, essentially, a hippie and a Marine have agreed that complacency isn't working.

So go out, get involved, have a political debate, something. Just fight like an Egyptian.