My vote for the best invention of humankind is the Internet. For example, here I am in my apartment instant messaging with someone named mimimi in China little or no cost (in fact mimimi just told me that over there they can go online for just $1 an hour). The Internet is a good thing….perhaps to good. There is so much information and so many choices that begs the question of how can I process it all. How can I manage it. Once online I stay online for hours. I seem to have an opinion on evereything I come across…INFORMATION OVERLOAD.Well, I decided to take a stand and try to focus this power that the Internet has unleashed into something useful and lasting. The result is this blog in which I hope to try control the flood of information coming at me into a more manageable river. The only caveat is that flood will run through the dam of my mind so it will naturally take on my perspective. But of course you already knew that.
I originally named the blog Na Han which is Chinese for shout. I got it from the title of the book Call to Arms by the famous author Lu Xun. Below is a quote from the preface. In it he describes how when he was young he had many plans to fight for change in society but as he got older and experienced in life, his youthful energy had given way to a mature knowledge that reality and one’s dreams are sometimes mutually exclusive. Not losing all hope he wanted to use his wisdom of years to encourage those now on the battlefield. He described it as “cheering from the sideline.”
“Imagine an iron house having not a single window and virtually indestructible, with all its inmates sound asleep and about to die of suffocation. Dying in their sleep, they won’t feel the pain of death. Now if you raise a shout to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making these unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you really think you are doing them a good turn?”
“But if a few wake up, you can’t say there is no hope of destroying the iron house.”
Hopefully this blog will continue on Lu Xun’s spirit of encouragement to keep our eyes on the prize. However, since I have not yet retired to the sidelines I want to bring this call from the center, where all the action is.1
- this is reprinted from my first ever blog post on 11.24.01. In 5.10, I renamed the blog the Global Itinerant which better reflects my past and present experiences … but my principles for writing remain as they were when I began [↩]
