Just one person I watched a German film called the Lives of Others yesterday (look it up, it's by von Donnersmarck). It's about East Germany before the fall of the wall. I didn't expect to be a bawling mess by the end of it, but I remembered this article in the Huffington Post about Wikileaks: "No amount of bureaucracy or money can still the voice of every conscience inside the secret apparatus of power." and I remembered what I read about Bou Azizi in Tunis: "Mohammad Bouazizi, the 26-year-old Tunisian whose suicide on December 17 sparked unprecedented clashes in the Northern African country, will go down in history as the street vendor who toppled the regime of President Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali, who ruled Tunisia with an iron fist for more than two decades." and I remembered learning about the tragedy of the commons in that political science class freshman year, and what happens when everybody thinks they're just one person-- and if you think you're just one person, well, sometimes that's all it takes. Please don't take this as incitement to anarchy--that's not what I mean at all, besides you'll find that the people in the stories above never even hoped to change anything I was just moved by the power of insignificant people doing small, desperate, unassuming and kindly things |