#usguys

This might come as a surprise to most of you but here's the #UsGuys Website. I have been working on creating this website for more than a month in my free time. I am calling the website unofficial for now as no one (except a few people at the last moment) knew about this website. It isn't official because the official website was being worked upon by a team of people whom I joined in May to work on. We planned the design and functionality but due to family issues I had to halt working on it. When I got back I got busy with work and others were busy with their things as well. This was fine as I had what I needed but the website we had didn’t give a community feel because it didn’t honor the spirit of #UsGuys. I have been in this group since January and what I love about the group was how it was open to all and everyone knew what was going on. So I let that site be and made a page with all information about #UsGuys at one place. We have many places to engage with each other and keeping a tack of places would've has been hard. I know people in the LinkedIn Group that never knew Facebook Groups and Page existed; our Facebook group is as active as the Twitter stream right now. There was no need for another place to engage at. So what I did was create a page with all information about us and links to other places where people can find us.

There has been a lot of thought put into this because I wanted to do it right. Many might have questions about how the website works and how do we update it. I have posted another post on the proposed method to maintain the website and how it works. Most of the pages on the website update on their own cause they are binded to the #UsGuys Community Tumblr Blog (that would be this blog). This blog is built on tumblr and is a group blog, which means any of the group blog members will be able to post into the main blog. Another noteworthy feature of the website is it can be downloaded by anyone and can be hosted as a mirror incase the main website goes down for any reason; we still have the mirror sites. The other blog post states how those work too, as I do not want to get too technical in this post. We also a simple member directory which lists all the member names, twitter links, short bios, and a link to their website. Everyone can add themselves to it on their own. The Event page lists all the recent blog posts tagged ‘event’ on the Events page. It is pretty simple to use but was a bit complex to make. The way it is made, the domain name doesn’t hold much power and the Members directory will not be indexed by Google either. It’s made for informational purposes only.

So that’s pretty much it, people need a tumblr account to access the blog. I’ll need your registered tumblr email address to add you to the first few to the group, and then they can add the others!  The how to and where is in the more technical blog post here.

Lemme know what you guys think in the comments!

... and what are you doing about it?

The thing I am most afraid of is what I think of as "responsibility diffusion." That is when no one takes responsibility. When an event is so large and bad, that we are collectively paralyzed to stop it.

I lived in Germany for a long time wanting to understand how a nation, as well as individuals, deal with the question of responsibility in the face of massive, catastrophic evil. A lot has been written about the Nazi period and I have nothing new to add, so I won't try to here, but rather look at the present.

There is a mass of plastic sludge 300 feet deep and about twice the size of Texas swirling in the Pacific Ocean. Considering how recent the use of consumer plastics is, the size of this mess is terrifying. It takes 2 weeks to get there by boat and cannot be seen from the air. There is no master plan to clean it up, much less stop its growth. Even if there were, who would pay for it? This doesn't belong to any one nation, although it is clear that no one consumes more plastic than the United States.  A group of scientists were lucky just to get funding to go research it on site.

Who is responsible for The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (cute name for a massive disaster?!): Everyone. No one. Me. You.

How did we get here? Can I do anything about it? Am I helpless?

I am afraid that I do not do enough when faced with the massive issues we have to deal with (economic, environmental, humanitarian). We do try to live more simply, without debt, without insatiable consumerism, but there is the occassional plastic bottle and even more crappy Chinese kids toys floating around our house.   And what about the hungry families in my community? What have I done to address that need? If I lived smaller, could I do more? Let's face it, our current idea of a standard of living in the US is obscenely high and without precedent. In the 1950s the Vice President of my grandfather's employer lived in a three bedroom house in his neighborhood. Today, McMansions for one and all!  If I had been in Germany in the late 1930s would I have taken a stand against the Nazis or tried to avoid my own discomfort and fear? What will my grandchildren (and even my children) face in the future and how will they feel about my part in it? Lucky for me, I married the happiest German Dude alive. He reminds me that

Unresolved guilt is a useless emotion that accomplishes nothing

Moderation is chronically undervalued

We must be patient, particularly with ourselves

There are heros, like the scientists and engineers who doggedly pursued funding to research the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, like my Grand-father-in-law, who sabotaged Nazi bombs he was in charge of designing, putting himself and his family at risk.