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A month ago, I had great plans for this blog, full of design awesomeness and new sections and blinking lights for those of you who enjoy epileptic fits.
That didn’t happen.
I also planned to write a post each day (or, er, most days) on ways to spread the love during the month of St. Valentine, one of my favorite saints.
That didn’t happen either.
If you are reading this, you have miraculously found your way to me after I have changed blog addresses without actually telling anyone. And maybe you would be interested to hear the ideas I had for the Love Month Project. Here’s one.
Fill out a survey for someplace/thing/person that was a positive experience.
Yes, I know our lives are filled with those annoying survey requests. Yes, I know you’re busy, I’m busy, we’re all busy. But I used to work in a marketing group who designed surveys, and you know what happens to those surveys? They are only filled out by people who are so motivated by hating someplace/thing/person that venom and bile seeped through the survey and into our bloodstreams. Please, give someone who deserves it some good feedback.
An act of love changes the balance of good in the world…so love on.
In February, there is so much emphasis on romantic love that other types of love are ignored. While we love our significant others, let’s also remember to show love to the world. This month, I’ll try to post new ideas for love almost every day. If you have an idea for a way to show your love, please leave me a comment.
Give from the heart. The earthquake in Haiti reminded me that there is a fairly simple way to make a difference – one that is completely embodied in the icon of love: the heart. This way of showing love is by giving blood.
Even though almost all people have an ever-refreshing supply of blood, there is a chronic shortage of blood in the world. Giving blood is an act of love that should take no more than an hour of your time. The American Red Cross is a great place to start to find a donation site.
An act of love changes the balance of good in the world…so love on.
I wrote this post a year ago, full of hope that our new President was soon to pull troops back home and end the war in Iraq. A year later, peace is needed just as desperately.
On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed clergy in New York City about war - and the Vietnam War in particular. One of the most powerful statements was this:
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
There are many similarities between the Vietnam War and our current wars across the Middle East. I was shocked to learn, though, that Boeing Corporation is selling their Apache helicopters and GBU-39 bombs to Israel. Israel is using their bombs to attack the 1.5 million Palestinians that live in the Gaza Strip. In fact, Boeing has a $77 million contract to transfer bombs to Israel (source: Christian Peacemaker Teams).
My parents are part of CPT, a group of Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war. Today they are involved in a peaceful demonstration in front of the Boeing Chicago offices, to protest Corporate America’s involvement in destruction and war.
You may personally support one side or the other in the wars of the Middle East. But surely Dr. MLK was right when he said that our spirits are damaged when we allow military defense to become more important than efforts towards peace. Make no mistake – the institutions of war will keep running. It is so much easier to forget about the terrible conflicts and the horrors of war when we don’t see it in our own cities and towns. We can see conflict on the nightly news and then flip over to a sitcom or a movie.
But it’s not enough for us to say, “I wish for world peace.” The institutions of peace do not run on autopilot the way the machines of war have done.
We have a personal responsibility – each of us -to take action for peace and social uplift.
You may want to read Dr. MLK’s entire speech, linked above. It’s not that long, and you may be surprised at the parallels between that conflict and today’s.
The horrible earthquake that happened last night did not just decimate the island of Haiti. We all belong to the world, whether we are citizens of one country or another. Haiti’s devastation is our devastation.
My question is, what will you do to help? It’s easy to read words and say a quick prayer, or shake our heads sorrowfully. But those things do not rebuild, save, heal, give hope. We have an opportunity to help. I ask that each person who reads these words gives up ONE thing so that others in our world can be helped through this tragedy.
A fellow blogger is maintaining a list of organizations that are offering help. I have not checked these out personally, but here’s a place to start: itsjustlight.com/?page_id=777
For more information, you may want to check out these sites:
www.facebook.com/pages/Haitian-Earthquake-Relief/288681741232
http://thomasbobs.webs.com/apps/blog/show/2568258-haiti-earthquakehttp://thomasbobs.webs.com/moreinfohaiti.htm
Please add info through comments if you have any other sites, organizations, or ideas for aid. God bless.
5. Enhance your blog with social action. Now when you use your blog, you can integrate social actions with the help of Zemanta.com. Zemanta.com recommends images, links, tags, and articles from the socialactions.com database, making them easy to promote to your readers.
The add-on is currently available as a free download for Firefox or Internet Explorer, and is compatible with major blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad. You can act on the relevant social actions yourself, and then add them to your blog posts with a single click. Test drive Zemanta with their demo to see how you like it, and start spreading awareness to your blog readers about your social actions of choice.
4. Micro-Volunteer. You’ve got the fancy phone, now do something with it! You can make a difference with the help of companies like The Extraordinaries, by micro-volunteering on your iPhone. Just download their phone app, and you can volunteer with those ten minutes you’re waiting at the doctor’s office. You can help translate a nonprofit page into a foreign language, fact check for reporters, review congressional bills, even tag images for the Smithsonian. While it’s currently available only for the iPhone, the success is great, and they are working to expand to other smartphones. So you can do what you can, when you can, and still make a difference.
3. Be in the know, and vote with your wallet. KnowMore.org’s Firefox extension alerts you to the social and environmental impacts of brands, products, and companies as you browse the internet. Their database contains over 200 profiles of major corporations, and works with major search engines and your web browser.
KnowMore.org creates alerts about the worker rights, human rights, political influence, environmental concerns, and business ethics. Whether you’re searching for a product or service or directly entering a company’s website, KnowMore.org lets you know exactly what they’re up to, with a “Learn More” option if you want the specific areas of concern. Question your goods with the help of KnowMore.org, and vote with your wallet.
2. Give some temporary CPU time. If you’re a computer geek, chances are you have a bit of CPU horsepower lying around, and there is a research project out there that could use it! Distributed computing projects are used by researchers with huge amounts of data to compile, compute, and analyze. When you donate your CPU idle time, the research is broken into components and some of it is sent to your computer, where it can be worked on quickly and sent back to the main server.
You can donate your computer time by first downloading BOINC, and choosing your project of choice. They range from climate prediction to fighting cancer to advancing artificial intelligence. And you don’t have to do a thing; some of the graphics are pretty awesome, and you can see progress bars, too. You don’t need to have a PhD to do research, or money to donate to researching being done already, you just need a computer.
1. Donate your email. What better way to make a donation than to have someone else pay for it? replyforall is a free cause email signature that automatically inserts into your outgoing email messages. You have eight causes to choose from, each of which represents nonprofit partners. You choose your cause, personalize the information to appear in the signature, and you’re all set! replyforall then shares the advertising revenue with its nonprofit partners allowing you to donate without cash. Supported on both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, replyforall works with email clients Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Outlook 2007. Now you can raise awareness, drive donations for your cause of choice and monitor your impact all by doing what you do everyday – email.
Thanks to Pamela Kim for these excellent suggestions.
