• The internal activist

    Date: 2015.04.17 | Category: Green Party, Health, J2DW, Rants & complaints | Tags: ,,,,,,,

    crowd-of-people

    The list for a donor organ in Belgium is 1,248 patients long. Many will wait more than three years to receive a kidney. Roel Marien, 39 and the father of two young girls, says he does not have the time to sit and wait. So he took matters into his own hands and began to search for a donor among his Facebook friends.
    His move sparked a discussion among doctors and patients in Europe about the current system, which is based on strict laws and anonymity. Is it fair if people search for organ donors online to avoid endless waiting lists? Might social media give certain patients an advantage, if they can present their stories well online? Should Patients Be Able to Find Organ Donors on Facebook? (2015) by Benjamin Duerr as published in The Atlantic.

    I am an activist. But I am not a normal activist as you might think. I am an activist for one person – me, myself, and I.

    This may seem like a selfish position, but in the day of online slacktivism, I think we are all activists for ourselves. You have the people who use GoFundMe to ask for money for school/health, or to ask for a kidney.

    My activism may be a bit more broad – I care about the Green Party and the Environment, my health, and other causes close to my heart. But try and talk to me about something outside of that, and I’ll be with the rest of the world watching Pop Star.

    And isn’t it sad that we can’t move out of our bubbles, our comfort zones, to consider what others are being activists for? What is close to their hearts?

    I heard it said once that liberal-types unfriend more people on Facebook than conservative-types, because conservative types are supposively more open minded. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do have a hard time reaching other activists in my sphere about my non-profit Journey to Diversity Workplaces.

    Does that mean they don’t care? I don’t know. It means that they don’t care enough to look deeper into what I’m presenting.

    The same can be said with my own kidney search. I haven’t taken to GoFundMe, because I am not out of pocket for any expense money. However, I have been on the transplant waiting list for 8 years. Yet a previous blog post I did on the topic got very few reads.

    So what does all this mean? We’re all selfish bastards, and we need to learn to both lighten up, and to support our friends, and neighbours.

    Because isn’t that what a good neighbour would do?

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