Tell me what you are not good at.

I would add in that there is more than just an electronic set of things to do to really have the “social” part of the campaign work too. When people give honks of money to your campaign, show them the results of the work if you can.

There’s a charity that I give to that was very obscure. I -knew- exactly where the money I was sending was going. Well, I’ve been giving to this charity for years, not heaping piles, just what I could. I even checked into the socioeconomics of the locality & am still surprised at the wretchedly screwed up nature of them.

Well, this past year some *other* people got involved in giving to them, and I got pointed towards them. They did all this sort of active fund raising campaign organization stuff on a local level to put together people to ‘do stuff’.

The result was, well they raised more money than normal, and I got like a nice thank you out of it that was very new media-ish.

My point is that often, there are charities out there who don’t have the faintest clue about doing -any- of this type of thing. There are plenty of situations where you people, just by virtue of being able to read these things, are the person with the lamp in the world of darkness.

You can pick problems to work on too. That’s one of the nice things that you can do. There are a lot of them that need work. Some are local, some are national, some are international. Some are all of those.

However, there was someone who expressed some despair about working to save pets. This is a great example of what can be a strange set of problems caused by, or related to the activities of others. In some places, pets can be found homes, in other places, the animals some people keep as pets are seen as being “bad”. In some places, the pets people keep can be “bad”, and in other places, they can be “good”. In some places, the things some people call pets, other people call food. And, in way too many places, you might be very tempted to humanely execute a beloved pet to save a child from starvation. In some places, one persons pet is another persons invasive species that kills off endangered species.

None of the people who seek to save pets from bad fates are people with bad motives. However there is no way to deal with the problem in a unified or easy way because of it’s nature.

There are even some species that are only being kept alive because the people who cared about them saw no alternative than to encourage captive reproduction amongst whoever would be interested. There’s a whole world of frogs dying off right now, and snakes and other reptiles that are endangered.

People like keeping snakes as pets though, even poison ones. However, consider the Python… Keeping one of them in Canada, or any number of other species of potentially strange reptile, and there’s no threat from it. However the same creature in Florida let loose could wreck havoc. Even in the case of alligators and giant snakes, it’s unfortunate they can’t be found homes in like cold and desert regions where children are unlikely to be able to see them, and where if they got loose, they couldn’t go feral & cause trouble.

I have a better example of ‘how to’ do something about ‘bad’ problems you find out about. If there is something bad happening, and you’ve found out about it because of ‘the news’ or some source on the interplumbing, you have a potential trail to follow to find other people trying to do something. If it’s in a conflict zone, often by contacting people, or organizations in the area, you can find out ways to do direct aid.

If you -don’t- find a way to do direct aid because there’s no one else doing anything, well you then have a different problem. Then you’re the person who can create this thing that’s needed.

In China today they have a phenomenon that’s been somewhat translated as being a ‘flesh search engine’ (人肉搜索). All manner of things that people in other countries would find unusual are accomplished this way. One of the ways that the country mobilized to aid people who got hurt in the earthquakes there was because regular people used technology in that way to do it.

In conflict zones, a person CAN track down ways to get things from one place to them. They CAN figure out ways to generate change directly. Sometimes that’s going to mean thinking beyond your own borders to do it.

In one place, I help fund an underground railroad away from the conflicted area. It resettles people in safe places where they are welcome to live peacefully. There’s nothing illegal about what I do either, in fact I end up doing a good thing. Yes, there are some rather evil people who don’t like it, but well, frak them and their horse, especially given that the situation ends in one where no one has any complaints about the results.

Really the question if you’re reading this is, so you have a problem with something? Well, what are YOU going to do about it. Do any flaming thing that even looks like helping and talking to others about it, and well, you start creating solutions. You’re reading this? You can use teh goog too I bet? If it’s not there or on hayahwhat, bong, doggy beta, blahdo, or any of a whole pile of other search engines, hey then what it means is it’s all you. Perhaps you can find a market and hire a truck in one place to go to someplace else, perhaps it’s that simple in some instances, and can be done with some creative thinking & the seriously cheezy and crappy website you make. If you just be decent and honest, and look for people who are the same, well most places you can find some of them that could do something if only ___.

If any of you have a comment on this we would like to hear from you. http://www.maps4pets.com/contact.asp