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Clearly I've offended you. Tempting as it may be to engage in keyboard combat, I'm not going to respond in kind to your lashing out, because I don't see any sport in circular firing squads.
When I look around, I see a minority of switched on, thoroughly decent folks busting a gut to make a difference, and I weep for their ROI. A lifetime's hard graft can be summarily erased at the whim of some scumbag in a boardroom.
I want to find a way to change that equation. I want to see a platform for solidarity; a movement dedicated to making the noise of decency in the signal of colonialism into a signal which folks can tune into.
Kimmo-
Seriously, start a thread. Make that space and invite people in. There's even a long-standing tradition here of pointing people at the thread where people care about a subject that's derailing the one you're in. That has to be better than just telling people in all the other threads how facile they are.
itsbruce
I think @hoefla can claim to have picked up a shovel, I really don't think you can. Did you even read her account of both working hard on a cause and wondering how much that effort counts, and how much else she might be doing? I know for a fact there's a fair number of people on here with that as a dilemma they'll always face. But you had a revelation and now you're holding a shovel. Big man, so you are.
I've spent my entire adult life either working for voluntary organisations or volunteering for them. Opinionated twats who think it didn't contribute, when all their contribution has ever been is feeling virtuous, are the bane of my life.
I spent some time in health/disability organisations. There's a whole range of issues to address there, some big, some small. Sometimes I was active in the politics of it, and sometimes I was holding somebody over a toilet so they could relieve themselves and helping them wipe their arse afterwards. Did I get the balance right? I mean, I was just there with the flannel, but you picked up a shovel.
Most of my free time these days goes to a charity that helps homeless/unemployed people prepare for job interviews. Clearly, according to you, what I should be doing is telling the founders that they're just slapping a sticking plaster on the problem. I mean, I know it is, and obviously I could do better for them, their clients and everyone by telling them how useless that is. That would be so much more useful than, say, the time I was dealing with an old fella from Mali, who had come here with his orphaned granddaughter and was trying to support her on the job he'd been given watching security cameras for pennies, at a location the other side of London so that he had a three hour commute either way and barely had time to help his granddaughter on the pennies he had left after paying his fare. All I did was talk to him, find out he'd been a museum curator before he had to leave the country, and help him find a teacher's assistant job close to where he and his granddaughter lived - which still fell far short of the work he was capable of, but was at least something better. I hope some of the political/social campainging I get involved in might help with the deeper problems, and I'll go to my grave wondering how good or bad those choices were. But you picked up a shovel. I should too, and smack the founders in the face with it. Obviously they never think about these issues, or they wouldn't be wasting their time just helping people.
I tend to assume that people on here often face the same thoughts, and themselves wonder how much they help and what they might do better with their lives, and so I don't insult them by telling them in every conversation how tedious and small minded their concerns are. Clearly I was wrong, and I should be picking up that virtuous shovel and hitting them over the head with it. Magical digital shovels never get dirty.
If there's a path from the bad place we're in to a better one, a lot of the work to get there will be done by people shovelling shit, not keyboard warriors.