This past Wednesday 104 protestors marched from Ball State to downtown Muncie where they chanted the same things as the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.”
“This is what democracy looks like!”
“We are the 99-percent!”
I understand the outrage. I’m surprised that it’s taken so long for people to stand up. I’m like the farthest thing from a Tea Party activist, but I understood when they took to the streets a few years ago, too. I can’t believe it’s taken this long to get people fired up.
FALSE PROMISES
Our lives have been built on false promises. Graduate high school. Get…
I grabbed a coffee and a meat pie. I brushed off the huckster trying to convince me to patronize his peep show. I had been traveling all over Australia for the past two months, and I was taking the morning off from sight-seeing and beach-going. I went to the newsstand in Sydney’s King’s Cross district and grabbed the morning paper.
It was September 12th, 2001 in Australia. Sitting on the stoop in front of that newsstand, the world changed; I never felt more American.
My Two Weeks Without Wolf Blitzer
For the past two weeks I haven’t flipped to CNN or Fox News once. I haven’t read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. As part of the Go Glocal Project I…
President Obama, with his American Job Act, isn’t the only one focusing on job creation. Below J. Brandon of Ascent Douglas – a movement to bring outdoor apparel manufacturing into Douglas County Nevada – offers some interesting insights into how one community is trying to create jobs.
What’s in a job? For every $1 of sales related to manufacturing, there is a $1.40 return throughout the U.S. economy. This is opposed to overseas manufacturing in which for every $1 of sales there is a 58-cent output.
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Where are you a local?
I live in Gardnerville, in Douglas County, Nevada. I’ve also lived in Silicon Valley, the Pacific Northwest, Las Vegas, and as a child, very briefly…
If you buy this piece of crap, a percentage of the proceeds will go to helping orphaned puppies achieve their dreams of catching rainbows.
How much will go there and how will you know if I follow through with this? You can trust me. I’m a guy that loves orphaned puppies; how could you NOT trust me?
Shopping Greifportunities
This is my biggest beef with social entrepreneurs. Most of the time there is a complete lack of transparency and accountability.
The Colbert Report did a bit on “Shopping Greifportunities” last night with a focus on 9/11 stuff. You can buy 9/11 shoes, merlot, a chessboard with firefighters and police officers going at it, and even a dog collar (in dog years the tragedy was only 1 ½…
What do Anne Heche, Kyra Sedgwick, and Jimmy Fallon have in common other than Kevin Bacon? They all received (along with Kevin Bacon) greeting cards designed and made out of recycled materials by Peruvian women in their 2010 Emmy swag bags. Grace Bateman Greene, the founder of Peru Paper, and I recently connected and she agreed to share her thoughts on travel, education, and the importance of a job.
I prompted her with this question:
I’m interested in how your travels and your education have impacted the course of your life. How has travel influenced your education? How has your education influenced your travels?
We live in tough times. Budgets are being slashed in households, cities, states, and our nation. Show me someone who hasn’t been impacted or had someone close to them impacted and I’ll show you a hermit with a billion bucks stuffed under his mattress.
With congress coming to terms at the last moment, the debt ceiling has been raised, but another $2.4 trillion of cuts are to be made over the next 10 years. $2.4 trillion seems like a lot, but it’s nothing that a nation of volunteers can’t make up for.
Let’s do the math:
$2,400,000,000,000 of cuts / 300 million Americans = $8,000 of cuts / person
Do you enjoy planning events, taking photos, editing videos, designing posters, playing guitar, playing video games, fire eating, sword swallowing, or working with spreadsheets?
I don’t mean to knock volunteering in a soup kitchen or swinging a hammer to frame a house, but that’s not the best way for me to use my time. Like BJ I don’t have a ton of time. I’ve got a two-month-old baby boy and a two-year-old daughter. (That’s a lot of diapers!) And I have to be very selfish with my time. Volunteering is an important part of my life, but I only have so much time,…
I’m excited to announce a new local group that I’ve helped found in Muncie along with Brandon Coppernoll and BJ McKay – LeadershipBoard.org. Last week we appeared at our first public event – Converge 2011 at the Horizon Convention Center. Today, I’m doing a three-part series on LeadershipBoard.org.
To kick the day off and to bring you up to speed on what we’re about, I simply cut and pasted our About page below. ( I wrote it, so why not!) I’d love for you to check out the site, if you’re a resident of Muncie we’ll find a way to put your feet on the ground and start making connections and a difference. If you’re…
If I had to narrow the goal of my writing to one thing, it would be empathy. I try to make my readers feel what I feel or feel what it’s like to be in my subjects’ shoes. That’s why I’m such a huge fan of this video and of Jeremy Rifkin’s book, The Empathic Civilization.
Rifkin traces humans from our early day’s, trying not to be eaten on the African savannas, to modern day, and how we have divided the world into Us and Them. First it was blood, then tribes, then religions, then nations, and so on. Our Us continues to expand. It’s with…
It’s official. Muncie has been occupied. 
