ISA HOPKINS
// laugh-wrangler // idea-maker // community-builder //
Too Much Information- Headspace
- Twitticisms
- Viddin'
- Fotos
- Contact
-
Too Much Information
- Born in Cleveland, raised in various Northeastern(ish) American cities, and educated at Caltech and Georgetown, Isa Hopkins is your typical half-Cuban (but pure awesome) writer-activist-comedian. A Bay Area resident since 2005, she loves tacos, In-N-Out Burger, and the city of Oakland.Isa is a co-founder and editor-at-large of the quarterly humor magazine HOBO PANCAKES, creator and host of the YO! Welcome to SCIENCE! podcast, and a founding member of the sketch comedy troupe Femikaze. She worked as a correspondent and writer for VidSF and has performed stand-up comedy in clubs, bars, and laundromats across the country. She maintains the "Hot Men With Breakfast Foods" Tumblr, and previously ran the website Totally Kickass Parties. Her writing has appeared in The Molotov Cocktail, Gadling, AOL Travel News, RustWire, and Grist.Isa is also a two-term Americorps member, with Habitat for Humanity and, later, Rebuilding Together. She is easily romanced by well-constructed jokes, a cultural appreciation of the Rust Belt, and any references to Jane Jacobs.
-
Posts
- May 14, 12
- Apr 25, 12
The time has come… for retractions.
Last fall, I posted about “New Girl,” the Zooey Deschanel sitcom which debuted to great hype on FOX. (Remember when that was supposed to encapsulate the experience of the contemporary twentysomething? Before Lena Dunham showed up?) Back then, I decried the show’s stereotypical deployment of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope; Deschanel’s Jess seemed to exist for the sole purpose of adding sparkle to an apartment full of bros. It was a pretty wretched pilot, and I resolved not to watch again.
But numerous sources have been whispering to me, for the last two or three months, that the show had gotten way, way better — and so last week, in the midst of a soul-crushing work project, I decided to enjoy some post-office relaxation with “New Girl.” And lo, the numerous sources — they were correct!
The show has dialed down Jess’s Manic Pixie meter a few notches, registering now at somewhere around “Awkward, Weird, Girly Nerd-Girl” rather than its former “BALL OF CUPCAKES AND SUNSHINE AND KITTENS YAAAAAAYYYYY!!!!!” Even more crucially, the show has fleshed out the rest of its cast: the bros populating Jess’s apartment have grown into full-fledged characters, quirky and neurotic in equal (though distinct) measure from Jess. Also, Jess’s best female friend has been upgraded from a recurring character to a regular, reducing the sense that Jess is “The Girl” adding prance and sparkle and estrogen-dust to her dude-crew. In short, the show has matured well beyond its initial cliche to become a funny bit of storytelling about a group of people on the cusp of thirty, trying to navigate adulthood.
Which brings me back, once again, to “Girls”. The characters on that show are a couple years younger than those of “New Girl” but the underlying themes are the same: sex and romance, friendships, trying to find oneself and build a meaningful career and a meaningful life. The characters of “New Girl” have recognizable — though often ambient and unfulfilled — ambition, but it is markedly different from the ambition on display in “Girls,” which is more truthfully called expectation. But if the girls of “Girls” suffer from expectation and privilege it is only because the entire universe of “Girls” is designed to suit their needs: what is most grating about the show’s pilot is that the viewer is, to a certain degree, forced into sympathy for Dunham’s character, Hannah. Although she is so spoiled that her parents have supported her completely for the past two post-college years, it’s also pretty shitty parenting on their part to cut her off totally, with no warning, because they want a lake house. They know, after all, that she is working for free as an intern and unable to support herself — most reasonable parents might give a thirty-day ultimatum, or wean their children off gradually, or at least set up some kind of expectation of eventual self-sufficiency, but because Hannah’s parents have never done so her expectation that they support her indefinitely is not unreasonable. It’s an easy solution, borrowed from the Woody Allen/Larry David comedy playbook: how is it possible to generate sympathy for someone who is fundamentally unsympathetic, whose privilege is so obviously manifest?
Well, you can always make everyone else around them even more horrible.
Now, as the example of “New Girl” demonstrates, shows can certainly grow beyond their initial premise, developing depth and nuance along the way — it’s not impossible that “Girls” might not only offer Hannah a path to redemption but also color in the rest of her world with subtlety and genuineness. But the shows diverge greatly in the mechanics of their narrative setups: “New Girl” is based on somebody in their late twenties moving in with people found on Craigslist (highly relatable, non-specific), while “Girls” is based on being in one’s mid-twenties and newly cut off from one’s wealthy parents (highly specific, non-relatable to most of the world). Hannah’s closest cousin, in a certain sense, is Rachel from “Friends” — a spoiled girl who, in the show’s pilot, was cut off by her parents when she was in her mid-twenties. But Rachel made a conscious choice between security (acceding to her parents’ wishes, marrying someone they approved of) and independence, and was surrounded by a crowd of reasonably down-to-earth friends with her best interests at heart. Hannah, on the other hand, seems to operate in a moral vacuum.
Perhaps “Girls” will improve; perhaps the show will find its footing, find something to ground its protagonist in reality — we’ll have to see. Lacking HBO, I’m not in much of a position to keep watching anyway, and if Dunham continues to be compared to Woody Allen, I’ll take that as a sign to keep my distance. Like Allen, Dunham seems content to take the easy way out; it’s simple enough to create heroes in a world full of monsters and morons. The realism of “Girls” has earned it heaps of praise, but it bears little resemblance to reality as I’ve experienced it — diverse, subtle, self-sufficient, interesting, intelligent, worthwhile. ”New Girl” may bear more obvious markings of a sitcom (being on network television, its sex scenes are less cinema verite) — but in the depth and variety it has developed in its characters, the show is, as of now, the more real of the two.
- Apr 18, 12
So, I just watched “Girls.”
For those who do not live in the intersection of “feminism” and “comedy”, whose worlds may not have been filled for the last two weeks with “Girls”-related chatter: “Girls” is a new show on HBO, written, directed, produced, created by and starring a young woman named Lena Dunham. It is, so they say, revolutionary, a feminist achievement, funny and witty and real, even if there are no black people or Hispanic people or Asian people or gay people or any people who don’t come from huge amounts of privilege. (And that last clause is completely independent of the race thing: all these characters have parents or grandparents capable of sending them fat checks each month, so that they might pursue their twentysomething dreams in New York City.) But it’s hilarious and truthful, so that’s OK, the critics reassured me.
Having read so much of the pre-premiere hype and discussion, I felt certain of two things: 1) the show would disappoint me on a sociopolitical level; and 2) it would be funny. Only one of those things wound up being the case.
Because here’s the thing: in the show’s final scene, it occurred to me that I hadn’t laughed once. Not even my usual airy snort-to-myself that I do alone when I can’t quite muster a full-on chuckle — in an episode of something like “Parks and Recreation,” that airy snort happens at a rate of at least once every minute. But “Girls”? The show that only contrarians could dislike? It mostly just kinda bored me. I didn’t feel invested in any of the main characters. The adults — as in, parents and bosses and other responsible figures, not the semi-adult main characters — were all awful, dream-crushing caricatures. The exposition was clunky, and the references felt forced and, well, referential. Also, roommates who bathe together? While one eats a cupcake? Is this really a thing? Somehow, I don’t think that this is a thing.
Mostly, though, it makes me sad for Lena Dunham, who rose to prominence two years ago with the highly autobiographical film “Tiny Furniture,” in which she cast her mother and sister as her mother and sister (once again, Dunham plays the lead role; the whole thing is filmed in her parents’ Tribeca loft). ”Tiny Furniture,” much like “Girls,” is about a post-college slacker with big dreams but no actual plans, meandering through her white, wealthy world. I tried to watch it; it, too, bored the bejesus out of me, but it impressed Judd Apatow and the good folks at HBO enough that they gave Dunham her own series, and with complete creative control over it.
So why am I sad for her? Well, because she’s not a bad screenwriter or director, but she’s a far cry from being a good one — and instead of being pushed to become good, her mediocrity is being rewarded by the world. ”Girls” isn’t a terrible show, but it’s not a great one, and part of that is tied to its lack of racial or ethnic or socioeconomic diversity. The great joy and challenge of storytelling, after all, is inhabiting other worlds, building believable, relatable characters with whom audiences can empathize and, by that empathy, expand their own universes; it is in the landscape of our imaginations that we learn to reach out and understand people different from ourselves. Storytellers populate those landscapes, and they can choose to create characters and narratives that are familiar — that reflect our own selves back, prettily or not — or they can choose to challenge themselves and their audience, to broaden the scope of empathy we might offer up together.
But Dunham doesn’t seem interested in that task. Her life is the object of its own lens, but she lacks the critical skills to do anything substantive with that life — just like the main character of “Girls,” an aspiring memoirist whose cushy life (which she clings to) gets in the way of living anything worthy of memoir. Her world is as tiny as its furniture.
In skilled hands, privilege and insularity can be skewered into comic delight; the aforementioned “Parks & Rec,” after all, operates in a small town, although that show’s deft writing makes Pawnee feel much larger than the New York presented in “Girls,” whose writing belies both a lack of skill and a lack of ambition — not an absence, mind you, but less than there should be, given all the hype.
Is Lena Dunham making a pretty good show, for a twenty-five-year-old? Eh, it’s OK. It’s not very funny, but I wasn’t compelled to turn it off any point (I’m looking at you, “Whitney”/”Two Broke Girls”/”New Girl”). When it comes to portraying the misadventures of a young woman, I much prefer “The Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl,” a web series whose protagonist is a much more successful everywoman — she’s even more idiosyncratic than Dunham’s Hannah, but much more relatable, and a whole lot more fun to watch.
To read many of the reviews of “Girls” is to think that this is the first story ever told about a young woman. But it’s not the first, and it’s far from the best.
- Apr 16, 12
Illegal immigrants don’t take jobs Americans won’t. They take jobs Americans won’t—actually, can’t—under those conditions. They work below the minimum wage and without the protection of occupational health and safety laws or even the most theoretical rights of collective bargaining. Basically, they exist as if the New Deal never happened. Their enforced docility and legal defenselessness are precisely what make them attractive to employers. If they work so hard, it’s not because they have a stronger work ethic than Americans; it’s because they have no choice.
-William Deresiewicz, The American Scholar
Deresiewicz makes a further point about language: that Americans are most commonly described as consumers, passive takers rather than active makers, purchasers rather than participants. The above quote is about undocumented immigrants within America, the underclass of do-ers whose cheap labor enables the comfortable consumption of the rest of us — and although the Great Recession has revealed that comfort to be more fragile than anticipated, it is still a well-in-place artifact of American privilege. If in doubt, take a gander at this lengthy but deeply worthwhile piece of journalism from The New Yorker, detailing the human trafficking of… military subcontractors, who use coercive and abusive tactics to get and keep workers on American bases, staffing such consumer comforts as Taco Bells and beauty salons. They may be employed on American bases, working for American corporations, and if they were American citizens they would be guaranteed a panoply of legal protections — but like our domestic immigrants these vulnerable human beings are promised the world and then punished for their belief in the American Dream.
As consumers of cheap goods and services dependent upon underpaid and exploited labor, we are complicit. But we have the capacity to be so much more — to be active citizens of the world — to change these vile systems, and offer not merely the hollow product-placement of the American Dream but our partnership in building a just, boundary-less reality in which we all might share.
- Apr 04, 12
Yes, I will continue to beat the drum about shitty nonprofits not using donations effectively to actually DO a damn thing — and by “beat the drum” I mean “link to this excellent piece about charity-scamming and lack of efficacy in the highly-funded world of breast cancer.”
Seriously, it’s well worth a read.
- Mar 27, 12
…doing good is hard work. It’s humbling work, it’s a lifelong commitment, and it requires us to face hard questions about the way we live. And doing good, sometimes, requires us to wage war on sentimentality.
-my friend Jialan Wang, on Kony2012 and this article in particular
In the wake of Kony2012, there’s a hot new story of activism gone awry: playwright and performer Mike Daisey’s fabrications in his one-man show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” Daisey traveled to China to learn about the working conditions of Apple’s subcontractors and created a performance around his findings — but, as it happens, he made some of them up. Some are willing to forgive Daisey, in the name of narrative expediency or ideological coherence; others have burned him at the stake of journalistic integrity. Some have split the difference, claiming that documentary theater is equal parts documentary and theater, the messy collision of fact and fiction, and sorting out boundaries is futility.
But my favorite response is this one, from a journalist who has been in China for years: “Daisey’s fiction was predicated on the notion that China is essentially unknowable, that reporters never go to factory gates, that highways exit to nowhere… His story was initially a success because it satisfied so many of our casual assumptions about China and Apple.”
I like what Jialan has to say (above) about activism, but I think it applies equally well to storytelling. Here is Ta-Nehisi Coates, on learning a second language: “…And I have to believe that if I explored languages with more distance from English, I’d see even more interesting things and I would see, not simply highways, but entire flight-paths. ”
What is true of second languages — that it expands one’s worldview, one’s sense of potential, one’s empathy — is also true of encountering second stories. I had an exceedingly lost post planned on the matter but it turns out someone else has already said it all, and so much better:
“Power is the ability not just to tell a story about a person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.” This is, precisely, why Kony2012 is problematic; the white voices of Invisible Children replicate the single story that reduces Africa to an issue of Western saviorism. This is why Mike Daisey’s efforts, however well-intentioned, are fundamentally misguided — because the stories of Foxconn employees do not fit neatly into a proscribed narrative, a single story, and no matter how those stories compel us in the privileged West to action the damage they do to their subjects cannot be excused. Often, what these stories compel is the opposite of engagement; by refusing to see the subjects of stories as fully human, these stories make them all too easy to ignore as people. (The article at that link is quite lengthy, and fascinating on many levels, but the relevant incident occurs about 4/5 of the way through — well worth reading to.)
It bothers me as an activist to see the power of storytelling so misused, co-opting the strength and intelligence and solutions of affected populations. Daisey and Invisible Children and their ilk are well-meaning but their eagerness to define the narratives of others is stifling and problematic on a practical level; it may seem a lesser criticism to call it unimaginative, or strange to label such impassioned activism ‘easy’, but the stories proffered are both, and that, I find, is what offends me most — not that these white men (just sayin’) dared to tell such tales but that they didn’t dare to tell better ones.
What might a better story look like? Truthful, to be certain, and more complete, challenging audiences not by its neatness but by its fullness and mess — because most of all a better story is not circumscribed by its teller but only by the tale itself. Conflict and perseverance in post-colonial Uganda, globalization and labor conditions in the largest nation the world has ever known — these are big stories, so much bigger than Invisible Children or Mike Daisey, and in choosing to tell them at all those entities assumed an obligation to tell them well. Whatever arguments are to be made for them as activists or journalists or theater artists all miss this central point: that Invisible Children and Mike Daisey tried to tell stories about other people — people far, far away — and in that basic (but not simple) task, they utterly failed. Their stories were of victims and villains, characters instead of human beings; and their stories were about themselves most of all, heroes just for speaking of these faraway lands.
But real courage rarely comforts our assumptions or fits so squarely into our archetypes. We will do better — and more courageously — when, first, we begin to tell better stories.
- Mar 20, 12
Bank of America! The new monopolies! Credit card fraud perpetuated by credit card companies! Shameless abuse of the tax system! As if any of those four stories weren’t incentive enough to want to join the apparently consequence-free ranks of the one percent (or corporate personhood — science fiction authors have long written of transference of consciousness from man to machine, but how about from person to corporate person? Seems like a much more lucrative bet on eternity…), try this one on for size: CEOs of major companies apparently spend an average of twenty working hours per week (out of an average of fifty-five working hours) on tasks like “lunch with spouse,” “going to the gym,” and other “miscellaneous” things. (Note that I said they spent twenty working hours on these activities. Because in the corner office, hitting the gym and adding value to the international economy are interchangeable. WHAT?!)
And after you’ve clicked on that link, go ahead and read this article describing the working conditions of minimum-wage, benefit-free warehouse employees, for whom a too-long bathroom break can lead to termination (in America, folks). Just don’t expect Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to answer your outraged email about the high cost of free shipping — statistically speaking, he’s probably on a treadmill somewhere!
- Mar 15, 12
When I talk about bad approaches to social issues, this is the kinda thing that fits the bill.
Many Internet commenters are saying things like “But hey! Homeless people are earning money! WHERE’S THE PROBLEM?!”
The problem — like the problem with Kony2012 — is in thinking that this is actually accomplishing anything. What we (whereby “we” means people with enough privilege to be hanging out reading this blog) might think of as good ideas — or as any kind of solution — are often far off the mark. The idea of consuming our way out of entrenched, systemic problems — whether buying WiFi from a homeless person or jewelry from indigenous peoples — is appealing, but is also, at best, a band-aid on a gaping wound: the problem of poverty is structural, and any genuine solutions must be so as well.
This is the grand advantage of microcredit (which is also an imperfect beast), for in transferring wealth to those in need, it enables the impoverished to direct their own entrepreneurialism. Rather than getting visits from Brooklynites bearing Vogue, microcredit supports the develop of local business within one’s own community, rather than relying on exports and consumption by virtuous Americans.
This isn’t about cynicism, or snark. ”I’m just being practical” is the constant refrain of cynics, but the thing is, when resources are limited and people’s lives and livelihoods are at issue, one must be practical — practical about whether or not one’s actions are actually having a measurable, positive impact. In the case of Kony2012, they’ve certainly succeeded at pissing off Ugandans. Whether or not that was their aim is irrelevant — the road to hell is, as the old saying goes, paved with good intentions.
- Mar 11, 12
These campaigns don’t just lack scholarship or nuance. They are not bothered to seek it.
-On Kony2012
Thursday, I woke up (from one of many naps, because my body imploded on itself like a dying star) to discover that the Internet had exploded. (Again!) This time, though, it was not owing to a Kardashian wedding or a baby sloth in pajamas, but to something of ostensible value: the Kony2012 campaign, a media effort by the nonprofit Invisible Children to raise awareness of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and, by some unknown effect, therefore lead to his capture.
I am, as you can probably glean from above, skeptical. But many of the reasons why I am skeptical echo my sentiments towards the Susan G Komen Foundation, about which I began to pen a lengthy diatribe several weeks ago, before I got distracted and fell asleep — but a variety of other stories, and especially Kony2012, have drawn me back to the topic, and so here and now I’d like to discuss our discourse around non-profits and professional do-gooderism.
Here’s some of what I wrote a few weeks back, after Komen defunded Planned Parenthood:
“I have been separately employed by six nonprofit employers in the last twelve years, and I’m in the middle of filing with the IRS to (co-)start one of my very own. I think nonprofits do a lot of good. I also think Komen is representative of a certain kind of nonprofit which has grown tremendously in recent years, and which often does little good with vast resources — in fact, it’s possible to argue that, by diverting resources from programs which could do more good, these organizations actively cause harm.
It’s an extreme position, but for many nonprofit workers — those of us on the inside of the “nonprofit-industrial complex” — it’s also a sympathetic one. See, there’s a lot of redundancy in the nonprofit world, and more than that, the growth of “awareness” nonprofits — organizations who focus on fundraising, rather than programming — serves a need that is not only often narrow, but also enables avoidance of any of the real systemic change necessary to actually solve systemic problems.
Komen was and is a perfect demonstration of this. Komen’s purpose is, almost exclusively, fundraising — rather than develop their own programming, they serve as grantmakers to medical providers and other organizations who actually, you know, do stuff. (Like Planned Parenthood!) This lack of any actual responsibility to a client constituency is what has enabled Komen’s rapid growth; their efficacy is measured in dollars, so it’s irrelevant whether or not more women are living through breast cancer — Komen’s growth is proof that Komen is succeeding! People are AWARE! (It’s also enabled Komen to form partnerships with companies like KFC, because a bright pink bucket of hormone-fed deep-fried animal parts is clearly a gesture for women’s health. What?!)
It’s a very corporate model for nonprofit structure, privileging dollar-defined growth over any actual achievements within their target demographic, and the board of directors of Susan G Komen Inc. pays themselves accordingly. It’s also completely divorced from any of the nonprofits I’ve ever known, all of which have been, in some form or another, direct service providers — of health care, or education, or housing, or home repairs.
But foundations are nonprofits, and the big ones usually look a lot like Komen. Many people think interchangeably of organizations like Komen and Planned Parenthood — both are nonprofits, after all — but there’s a world of variety under that umbrella term.”
…The exact same issue is under scrutiny in Kony2012, though now with an added dose of white-saviorism. As it happens, Invisible Children is a very small nonprofit by staff size (they employ exactly three people), but by budget they dwarf many organizations ten times their size — they spent eight million dollars in fiscal year 2011, with nearly all of that going towards either overhead ($400,000 on RENT! Are you fucking kidding me?!) or film production — sure, the auditor’s report breaks down “film costs” as a separate category from “direct services,” but media-based “awareness” IS Invisible Children’s primary “direct service.” (Their numbers on compensation aren’t too shabby, either.)
In short: that’s a lot of money going to awareness, which is not only difficult to define, but infinitely more difficult to measure. And there’s the rub — nonprofiteering is about having a measurable, positive impact on communities.
Allow me to repeat that, because this seemingly simple statement gets misunderstood all over the goddamn place: nonprofiteering is about having a measurable, positive impact on communities.
Know what nonprofiteering is not about? Saving the world. The two are, however, frequently conflated, and in a dangerous way: the manner in which Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp, for example, holds out TFA as the great white hope of education — her highly-educated teachers will save the world for poor kids! — might make nice PR and keep the money flowing in, but it is actively damaging to people in her program. Because the truth is that working in the not-for-profit sector is really fucking hard, and NOBODY is going to save the world — much less in two years, with extremely limited preparation. The plural of anecdote is not data, but I’ve known multiple very good-hearted people who went into Teach for America and burned out on education within months; the problem wasn’t that they were bad teachers, or bad people, but that they’d been so poorly prepared as both. An Ivy League degree does not equip one to navigate the social codes of the Bronx or rural Texas, and the constant refrain — that they, by virtue of their affiliation with Teach for America, were capable of greatness and great change — only compounded their sense of failure. Intelligence and enthusiasm may be necessary conditions for creating real, measurable change in the world, but they are not, by themselves, sufficient.
Which takes us back to Kony2012, the founder of which — in addition to generally acting like a megadouche all over the place — seems to have a SERIOUS case of world-saving-itis. The language of the Kony2012 video — once they start talking about Uganda, five minutes into the damn thing – is all about white saviorism, and the capacity of the privileged to save the world.
The problem with this, though, is that awareness is kind of useless here. I could be the world’s foremost expert on Joseph Kony — the most aware person out there — and still have no measurable impact on Invisible Children’s stated goal, which is his capture. Because, seriously, the likelihood that Joseph Kony will randomly wander into the Lake Merritt or Golden Gate neighborhoods of Oakland, California is pretty much next to nil; and while I could do something like write my congresswoman to pressure her into engaging US forces in capturing Kony — well, as it happens, I’m aware enough to know that we’re already on top of that one, and have been for a couple years now. The guy’s pretty wily. My knowing that fact doesn’t change a goddamn thing on the ground.
But, the commentariat chorus goes, at least the guys of Invisible Children are doing something, which is assuredly better than nothing! Except they’re not the only people doing something, and they’re doing the least effective kind of something. There are multiple other nonprofits operating in post-war Ugandan reconstruction, with an emphasis on community development and education. These nonprofits and NGOs are, apparently, less media-savvy than Invisible Children, and their mission is not so reducible to a hashtag, but they are working WITH the Ugandan population rather than implanting their own ideas upon it.
This is, more often than not, the key distinction between a successful non-profit and one that exists to massage the egos of founders or board members. Although well-intentioned how-tos on world-saving might compare solving major social issues to technical problems like the space race, the truth is, they are worlds apart: nonprofiteering involves working with a constituent population, and people are a lot harder to figure out than physics. The most damning argument against the Kony2012 campaign is the very artifact the filmmakers have offered up as its centerpiece, a half-hour long video which frames its entire purpose around one of the founders’ five-year-old blonde, American, personal-electronics-wielding son.
That’s not a call to action; that’s moral masturbation. Making a difference isn’t about the come-to-Jesus stories of privileged white people with video cameras and Oprah-cash. It is literally impossible to have a positive, measurable impact on a community without first humbling oneself to listen to that community, to put aside the things one might think are best and listen to the needs articulated by the community itself — this is true everywhere, even in one’s own backyard, but it is especially true in foreign places (colonialism much?). And, sure, sometimes you might discover that your privileged, outsider perspective adds some value; but it can only add value to what is presented to you, by the community itself. Giving laptops to kids in rural Africa sounds sexy, but it turns out that clean water access, cheap medical care, and sustainable agricultural development are really more important in the region; it’s nice to think that we can leapfrog over deeply rooted structural poverty with some relatively cheap technological interventions, but that’s a pipe dream. It’s nice to think that capturing Joseph Kony will “solve” Northern Uganda, but such issues are multi-faceted and entrenched and not so easily “fixed.” In short, my answer to the Internet do-gooders, who diligently clicked and shared and felt enlightened by their actions: no, doing something is emphatically not “enough”. Anyone who is in the nonprofit game just because they want to get patted on the back for bothering to care is a liability — an ego — not an asset.
It is possible to hold nonprofits accountable. Not for saving the world; nobody can do that, and the concept is pretty much meaningless anyway — but for making positive change in a community, for having a measurable impact on a constituency, not on the consciences of donors or viewers. Nonprofits wind up having to spend a disproportionate amount of time appeasing donors (a structural problem, and a whole ‘nother can of worms), but we don’t exist for donors. Donors are not why we do anything. We are in service to our clients, and if we are not directly helping them, then we are part of the problem.
Expecting nonprofits to save the world is absurd, but suggesting that caring alone is sufficient is condescending as fuck. Action — real-world action, not YouTube views and Facebook shares — is, ultimately, the business of nonprofits, the heart of creating positive, measurable change in the world, and if the likes of Komen and Invisible Children are not up to the task, then it would behoove them to humble their organizations before the cause and offer their skills in marketing — and money-making — to those groups (like, say, Planned Parenthood) who actually DO a damn thing.
You know what, this blog doesn’t reach that many people — I think it’d be much more effective if I started a nonprofit to raise some awareness about this stuff…
(For more reading on the problems with Kony2012/Invisible Children: here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
- Mar 05, 12
When I heard that Andrew Breitbart had died, I was saddened. It is natural to think of the damage Breitbart did to people like Sherrod by embracing lying as a weapon. But I found myself thinking of the great injury he must have ultimately done himself, for by the end of the Sherrod affair, he was a man lying only to himself and other liars.
By embracing that deception, by neglecting to research Sherrod before putting up a clip of her talking, by electing to see her as little more than a shiv against the hated liberals, he deprived himself of knowledge, of experience, of insight, of enlightenment. That he might learn something from Sherrod, that he might access some power from her life, and pass that on to loved ones and friends, never occurred to him. Publicly, he lived to make himself right — a tradition that is fully empowered in our politics. Breitbart didn’t invent the art of making yourself right. But he embraced it, and then advanced it.That is what took me to sadness. I have experienced curiosity as a primarily selfish endeavor. It originates in the understanding of the brevity of life, and the desire to see as much of it as possible, from as many angles as possible without doing too much damage to my morality. The opposite of that — incuriosity, dishonesty, the opportunistic deployment of information — is darkness. Breitbart died, like all of us will, in darkness. But as a media persona he chose to also live there, and in the process has impelled countless others to throttle themselves into the abyss.I have heard it said by some fellow liberals that Breitbart was in fact a good person, that his public persona was not the same as his private. This kind of praise is so broadly true of most controversial public figures as to be meaningless. And it is irrelevant. Breitbart may well have been an excellent father and a great friend but that is not why we are talking about him. We are noting his death because of the impact he had on our politics and our conversation. It must be said that that impact was for the worse. Any talk of his private life, is an attempt to change the subject and avoid discomfiting truths.It is wholly appropriate to be sorry that Andrew Breitbart died. But in the relevant business, it is right to be sorry for how he lived.-Ta-Nehisi Coates (on the death of Republican spinmaster Andrew Breitbart) - Feb 29, 12
Romney is in sort of a quantum superposition between winning and losing, still waiting for the Republican base to look at him just a little bit harder and collapse him into one or the other.
-Kevin Drum, MoJo
…these are the metaphors which erupt when one-time Techers* become writers.
*Caltech, natch. Lord only knows what those brutes in Massachusetts use for self-reference…
- Feb 28, 12
From street art on San Francisco sidewalks to news from around the world: inequality is in, y’all.
If you need help to build up a good head of steam about the whole thing I can recommend two pieces from the most recent New Yorker, a bit of MoJo, and a write-up on CNN.com which was linked by a friend of mine who is a finance professor and an admitted member of the (age-adjusted) 1% – who prefaced the link with the heading “Yes, we are.”
Enjoy the views.
-
Tweets
- Old men in bandannas air-boxing while they jog: just another reason to love life on Lake Merritt.
- you guys... the 'ally mcbeal' theme song is, like, HELLA long. #vitalinformation
- The RELIGION issue of Hobo Pancakes has arrived! It's still unbaptized, though. http://t.co/caUpJEtU
- so, this is a thing that happened: http://t.co/RlZChdqr
- playing on scaffolding: it's the most fun a person can have while wearing cargo pants.
- lesson(s) of the day: nfl legend dwight clark is a very pleasant human being, and avril lavigne sucks at bagging groceries.
- all this healthcare stuff makes me wish there was Supreme Court Chief Justice Mary J. Blige, 'cuz then scotus would have NO MORE DRAMA.
- i cannot discern where this hangover came from: drinking too much, or too much of the world's fiercest game of CELEBRITY.
- "Femikaze History Month" closes TONIGHT! Laugh-time starts at 9 PM sharp at Berkeley's Subterranean Arthouse: http://t.co/pSwrQbLf
- You know you're old & lame when your only brag-worthy nighttime exploit is how soundly you slept... but seriously guys, it was THAT good.
- nothing tastes as good as SOLD OUT feels.
- Self-medicate away the pain of the GOP war on women with LAUGHTER: "Femikaze History Month" opens tomorrow in Berkeley! http://t.co/pSwrQbLf
- definitely just watched a full episode of 'mr rogers neighborhood' on hulu plus... but now i know how crayons are made, fools!
- OCCUPi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! happy nerd day, y'all!
- thanks to @eastbayexpress for the sweet write-up! http://t.co/aH99oLKl
- "They just expect you to shit quarters in this town, huh?" - my dad, on parking in san francisco.
- 'cougar town' features a character regularly referred to as a "ridiculous cuban." FINALLY MY PEOPLE ARE REPRESENTED ON THE TEEVEE!!!!!
- all i want to do with my life now is put pajamas on baby sloths. THANKS FOR ANOTHER UNATTAINABLE DREAM, INTERNET!
- I WROTE SOMETHING FOR THE INTERNET BOOYA! http://t.co/cV57bpwn
-
Uploads
-
Public Photos
