From ABC News: (I've heavily edited this, see the original)
By early August, HSBC formally began applying a 9.9
percent interest to the debts of nearly 250,000 British students. Here
in the land of genteel socialism, the response was predictable: fury.
But students are always angry about something. But that is
counterbalanced by the fact that they are also usually powerless. The
result is typically a whole lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
But this time, something changed. And that change may prove to
be very significant. What happened was that 4,000 of those angry
students went on to the online community site Facebook, which is
especially popular with college students, and joined a group dedicated
to getting HSBC to reverse its decision.
The group, created by Wes Streeting, vice president of the
National Union of Students (NUS), was entitled "Stop the Great HSBC
Graduate Rip-Off" (a classic example of hubris: only postadolescents
would characterize the end of a charity as a "rip-off.")
Literally within days the group had 4,000 members, all
loudly demanding a return of their preferential treatment. And then an
amazing thing happened &
HSBC, the world's fourth largest corporation, with assets of nearly $2 trillion, caved.
Between 1994 and 1996 I organized people mostly through e-mail to fight digital censorship legislation. Last month college students in the UK organized on Facebook to fight policies of banking giant HSBC in the UK, and won.
The skills are similar, all that's changed is the venue. It was e-mail, now it's Facebook. To those who say "It's an entirely new world of skills and techniques" I say no, it's just politics. Only your megaphone has changed.
Ok, this is weird.
I've moved to a place where I have dozens of friends.
This wasn't unintentional. It's the main reason Sarah chose this for "her turn" to move us, and ironically enough, researchers have found that happiness and longevity is linked to spending time with friends. But it's definately a new experience. In DC I would have counted maybe a dozen friends and they were all in seperate circles so they never made plans together.
Here's they all know each other and do things together. By the way that includes showing up in our hospital room when our son was in for tests. That was truly touching, and probably wouldn't have happened in DC unless we were in the hospital for a full week.
I'm suddenly juggling art openings to attend in support of friends and birthdays to remember and parents funerals to send flowers to and all that sort of things. It is all-consuming, but it's really, really nice. I end up seeing these people pretty much every week. I had totally forgot what this was like.
In DC my ability to make friends at work was completely removed because "I was the boss". And it's such a transitory town that friends I made were isolated from others, and often left town for other jobs and lives.
The last time I can remember this experience was when I was in NY over ten years ago. Imagine going ten years without a sizable group of friends. This must explain part of why I became such a recluse. (There's also the fact that I'm a borderline introvert.)
Weird. There's a whole set of associated manners I'm re-learning as well.
September 20, 2007 in Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)