Why conservatism will always be powerful, in two sentences:

People who fear they will be hurt by a change speak up immediately, loudly and without regard for the odds or reality.

People who will benefit from a change don't believe it (until it happens), so they sit quietly.

Thank you Seth Godin. You advocate for efficiency. And then you put it into practice linguistically. Well done.

Seth Godin worries about the way people use the word "save" (save like rescue, not save like put in the bank).

Makes me wonder about saving the world: what exactly we want to save and what we ought to leave behind.

Here's the ad that started the conversation.

Here's Stephen Colbert's response:

Here, apparently, is the follow up, from Maggie Gallagher, President of the National Organization for Marriage, the original admakers.  I found it in a Huffington Post article, uncited...

I've always thought Stephen Colbert was a double-agent, pretending to pretend to be a conservative, to pull one over Hollywood. Now I'm sure.

And here's another, less surprising reaction to Colbert's video...

I get struck by gay lightning all the time.

I started following @karlrove on Twitter the other day, and, ever since, a steady stream of conservative tweeters have been following me (conservative to the point of mentioning the word conservative in their tweet-size Twitter profiles).

Is that weird?  Cause for concern?  Cause for celebration?  Opportunity to make online friends with a totally new demographic?  Hmmm...

I sent this note to my cousin the other day.  Because he's undecided.  Because he's 22.  Because he's creative.  Because he's fundamentally kind and generous and thoughtful.  And because I love him and want him to share my excitement...

I don't like the idea of voting for an old man.  Not unless his eyes sparkle with youthful ideas. 

I want to vote for love and generosity and curiosity and open mindedness.  The stuff of the young and inspired.

Battlescars aren't wisdom unless they teach change.  Attachment to the status quo is despair.  Yearning for a happier yesterday is helplessness.  Conservatism is admitting that we can't be any better than what we are now or what we were then.

And, even if that is true - if there are limits, and we've hit them - I say we bite, smash, and hammer away at them anyway.  Because it's more fun to hope than to hoard and hide and isolate.

The More Perfect Union speech was beautiful.  The tire gauges were, silly as they sounded, quite possibly the most reasonable energy policy idea the US government has had in long time.  The man is cool under pressure.  He's thoughtful and knowledgeable.  He's curious.  His wife is a superstar: absolutely rightfully unsatisfied with this country and working to make it better.

Warren Buffet and Colin Powell and Fred Wilson and Marc Andreessen and Eric Schmidt and James Fallows and Oprah all believe in him.  Smart people.  Reasonable people.  Innovative people.

If Obama's not different, if he's nothing but an actor, bummer.  But we'll move on.  We'll save the world despite the US government.  We'll clean up its mess.  Tirelessly.  We'll make it irrelevant.  We'll do all its work for it.  With philanthropy.  With sustainable business.  With literature.  With poetry.  With simple acts of kindness and love.

And without fear.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't vote.  It doesn't mean we shouldn't hope.  It doesn't mean we shouldn't take this opportunity to support the candidate that inspires musical genius.

Peace.  Love.

I just watched Clay Shirky, whose thoughts I absolutely love, give the final keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

He talked about the internet, information overload, publishing, and filtering. 

Before the internet, because publishing was expensive, we filtered content (media) and then published it.  Now, because publishing is no longer expensive, everyone can publish, and lots of people do, filtered only by their own personal sense of which thoughts of theirs they (or the social media infrustructure into which they dump thier thoughts or record their lives) consider newsworthy.  If we want to filter all that information, if we want to find quality, however we define that, we need to filter after publishing has already happend. 

And we're still working on that, still trying to figure out how to do that gracefully, dynamically, in ways that evolve with the evolution of the tools with which we gather information.

It was a good speech.  Not as exciting to me as some other Shirky.  But certainly worth more thought and maybe, someday, some written response.

Right now, however, I'm tangentially locked in on a quote that Shirky presented with reference to the information overload problem.

Yitzhak Rabin, a man that had significant experience with a long-standing problem, once said:

If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it's not a problem; maybe it's a fact.

And that's a statement that worries me.

Problems beg solutions.  Facts beg acceptance.  And I like solutions better than acceptance. 

I think acceptance is dangerous.  It doesn't have to be dangerous.  Some people will read or hear that Rabin quote and see real value in it, see the pragmatism, the honesty, and the call to action.  If Israeli-Arab conflict is a fact, some people will recognize that it's still a fact to be actively managed, a fact to in some sense accept but a fact that requires mitigation of the sort that strives to make it no longer a fact.  Some people, however, will take that word fact too deeply to heart and get conservative,* get complacent, admit helplessness, and decide not to devote energy to changing something that, by some definitions at least, is unchangeable.

If the conflict is a problem, however, it must, by definition, have solutions, and I think it's useful to acknowledge the existence of solutions.  It fights the feeling of helplessness.  It fights complacency.  It fights conservatism.  It motivates. 

Anyway, I think I might have digressed into something of a downward spiral of semantic frustration, but hearing that quote set me spinning, and I'd rather spin out in the open and hope someone responds and sets me straight or soothes me, so I figured I'd crank out another high speed, impulsive post to close out my 48 hours or so in New York.

Time to go catch the Chinatown Bus (and want to talk to the driver and ticket man but probably get shy about it and just sit and listen to their conversation, which, most definitely, will be in Fuzhou dialect and almost entirely incomprehensible, especially to a Chinese student that has been totally slack for a solid 9 months).

*Note: I define conservatism as the tendency to preserve and protect the status quo, even if it's suboptimal, and I don't like it.  I don't think I've ever written much about my thoughts on consevatism as I define it, but I do explain myself a little bit at the end of this post, so, if you're curious or think I'm crazy, have a look, and let me know what you think.  I'm still pretty confused about conservatism and how I feel about it, so I'd much appreciate any thoughts you might have.