Take your facebook picture and shove it

Let us discuss the modern chain letters that is facebook. The following text, has been making the rounds:

"Change your Facebook profile picture to a cartoon from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same. Until Monday there should be no human faces on Facebook, but an invasion of wonderful childhood memories. This is in protest of violence against children."

I am against child abuse. I am pro cartoons. But this little meme does a few things:
a) It accomplishes nothing. There is no money collected for shelters, no real awareness is raised. Just as every single person in America knows about breast cancer, I would submit that 0% of Americans would say that they are pro-child abuse. And yet child abuse continues. Here's a thought, let's all just put this text in our facebook profile: "I do not abuse children." Then through the process of elimination we can find those who did not insert that text, and arrest them.
b) It gives the false smug glow of doing something. "Well *I* showed *my* support," you say. Well that's nice, but you didn't do anything. I don't full agree with Gladwells similar get-off-my-lawn rant about this sort thing with twitter, but I do think that these small things create a sort of false positive energy that doesn't get people to do more for a cause, but to do less because they have already shown *their* support.

The point is, you citizens of facebook can do whatever you want. I wrote on this blog long about ways to volunteer in the DC area, but I have reached a point where I genuinely don't care what anyone else does or doesn't do. I'd like more people to get involved in their community, but I know that this is not a real soapbox, and my fine record in high school debate team has never lead to much actual convincing of anyone in real life. Still, with what little voice I have, I will continue to call bullshit when I see it. And your facebook profile picture is bullshit.

Social Engineering Failure

Today a small rant on the laziness that surrounds me.

My street, like many newer cul de sacs does not have individual mailboxes or mail slots on each house. Instead all the mail for my street and that street perpendicular to it are located in one of those little collected mailbox pavilions you see with townhouse developments. Let me note that these are very short streets. Certainly less than the length of a football field each. And yet, rather than walking to these very close mailboxes, people who live on the street drive up to the mailbox pavilion and then drive to their driveway, 50 feet away.

Now there are two purposes of these collected mailbox contraptions. One is to speed up the job of mailmen, and for this the pavillion is successful. (Except when people have packages which then are instead taken all the way up to your doorstep, but anway . . .) And the other is to foster, in some very small way, a sense of community. People on the street are theoretically supposed to walk up to the mailbox, get their mail and say hello to their neighbors. This is tough to do when you walk two feet away from your car and then two feet back to your car.

Now since our economy started tanking, a lot of pundits have been prophesizing when the recession will end and things will turn around in this country, and I have a little theory. It will start occuring when people stop being lazy and start walking to their own mailboxes.

Ice Priorities

This week there was a bit of ice. I did what I usually do in these circumstances, given that I live a mile and change from work - I walked. Luckily I didn't fall on my ass and there were only a couple of proper slip 'n' slide moments. But for multiple days most of the sidewalks on my path were troublingly unattended. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't expect all sidewalks to be magically clean the moment I set out to work. I don't even expect that of the roads. But after the roads have been somewhat attended to - take care of the walkers. The first stretch I walk is Gosnell Road, a short stretch that connects Route 7 and Chain Bridge Road, two major arteries.

Tysons Corner had ambitions (delusions) of becoming some sort of great walkable, livable hub (Arlington). But clearly when the conditions get bad, there's a disturbing lack of attention to helping pedestrians. Those who ride the bus, and there are actually quite a lot in Tysons, need to be able to walk to the already poorly tended bus stops without busting their ass.