as some email conversations and weblog reading progesses, i’m still rolling around a bit with this question: what is grassroots?
i’m willing to accept the value of searching out and connecting 30000 “grassroots” projects for humanity. i understand the whole range of comment on globalization and grassroots. i understand, too, that so many dualities, so called patterns of opposition, need mending and marrying. so the title of the overall project caused some confusion for me.
thinking about 30000 “good” projects leaves open the possiblity of defining good. 30000 marriages is more interesting yet. thrilling to think of 30000 projects that marry one something with another something else that shouldn’t be able to fit with the first something. i *think* this might be the thing that resolves some of the things in this recent 30000 post: the marriage of former-president and citizen-activist, the marriage of world-futures and seven-year-olds, the marriage of global-brand-coke and renewable-energy.
it seems to me that the important practice to be established is one of finding pieces that common knowledge says can’t go together and then finding the uncommon wisdom that most definitely, practically and obviously does unite the two. a practice of shocking ourselves with bits of a new world coming together, rather than with the foundations of an old world breaking down and apart.
take this New Yorker invitation via mark dilley: “…If you find the media’s Iraq coverage unsatisfactory, pick up the phone. Don’t call the Times, or CNN, or Rupert Murdoch; call Baghdad. There are a couple of Iraqi phone books available on the Internet, and plenty of interesting people willing to share their stories directly…” would these conversations be grassroots action or globalization? i think yes!
technorati:smallchangenews