Join Razoo. Do a good deed from those listed, or set up your own "good act." Winners get travel prizes. What do others think of such promotions? Are we trivializing giving? Is this the kind of incentive that matters to givers? Will micro-good-deeds add up to something?
Looking at Razoo and at Change.org what seems to be missing is something like what Rousseau would have called the creation of a public will. That is, we have a bourgeois model of tiny consumer choices and micro deeds that are somehow supposed to aggregate into something worthwhile; "the market" will somehow produce big results from little acts. The power of many, the wisdom of crowds will bring good results from trivial, isolated, individualistic, gestures aggregated.
I tend to think we need to see giving/democracy/civil society as more the creation of shared understandings through conversation. Then, when we begin to see things in a certain way, and begin to see one another as allies and friends, and when we begin to use words like solidarity and common purpose, our will, our funds, our lives and our deeds can be "aggregated" in acts that form what amounts to a movement within a shared mythos or set of ideals, or common narrative. Short of that we are entertaining ourselves and putzing about.
My perspective is that of a Boomer, yes. And I am truly interested in what Gen X or Y folk have to say, from their generational wisdom and understandings. The next big movement, the thing that might just pull us all back from the brink of extinction, will not come from folks my age, but from the people who are now finding themselves and one another online. They are not "bowling alone," they are online, collaborating, outside the view of their near-sighted elders who rue the declining membership in the Elks and Kiwanis Clubs, or Jewish Federation, or Rotary, or the established political parties. Rather than criticizing the rising generations, I hope simply to remain involved as a nearly obsolete elder, learning what he can before the lights go out. (My thoughts on Gen X and Y are indebted to Sharna Goldseker. I interviewed her by phone yesterday. More on that in another post.)
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