Getting Off the News Cycle

[Plaid Adder]

I believe that to do service right, you have to be enjoying whatever it is that you do. Basically I think selfishness is sort of built into human nature and the best we can do is to train ourselves to enjoy helping others instead of enjoying seeing them suffer or being so content to enjoy ourselves that we never wonder what's happening to anyone else. What this means is that if you are trying to help people, either you are enjoying it for its own sake, or you are enjoying it because it gratifies some unacknowledged ulterior motivation (feeling superior to those you help, for instance). With this in mind, I wanted to share a few reflections on what I got out of the 40 Ways project:

1) I 'met' some DUers that I had not met before. New friends! Hooray!
2) I learned a shitload, not just about Katrina but about Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Gulf Coast. Learning is good. Sometimes my brain gets real starved.
3) It cheered me up to find out what other DUers were doing for the Katrina survivors.
4) I liberated myself from the media news cycle.

THat last point is the one I figure you all will be most interested to hear about. Although it meant that the threads were not necessarily attracting a lot of comment, it was liberating for me to focus on one project for 40 days without allowing myself to be distracted by the media horror du jour. Not that that stuff isn't important, or that I didn't care; I kept up, I just didn't have time to post about it all because I was dedicating most of my internet time to the 40 Ways thing. The news kept cycling on its merry way, one media crisis disappearing under the heels of the next, and I kept plugging away at the same topic. It was nice to feel like at least for myself and in that very small way, I was the one deciding what was going to be important that day.

I know there are other DUers out there who have done the same, dedicating themselves exclusively to one subject in a sustained way--election reform, for instance. To those who have, I salute you, and to those who haven't, I recommend the experience: sustained attention to one issue, no matter what else pops up on CNN.com that day. It is a refreshing and invigorating experience.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder