One of my duties at the new job is to open my boss’ mail. Since it’s both holiday card and end of the year appeal and donation season, there’s a lot of mail these days. One of the groups that we received a card from sent this very simple piece of natural brown card stock onto which was glued a small rock with the word HOPE etched into it. The message, too, was pretty simple saying just “Because everyone deserves a little hope. Please pass it on.” above the Executive Director’s signature.<\/p>\n
I thought it was a neat idea in these very trying and troubling times, to send out a little reminder of hope, or of peace, or joy. <\/p>\n
What do you think would happen if I sent the same note, with a little rock that said Hope to a dozen random strangers with no signature? Would they take comfort from it or would it freak them out?<\/p>\n
I know in these times of war, bad economies, pandemic disease, disconnection and intolerance that I need to be reminded that all is not lost, that the only constant is change, and that there is still a chance that things can get better. <\/p>\n
Perhaps I can incorporate it into my guerilla war campaign to change thought. Back in the late 1980s\/early-1990s someone got the bright idea to raise gay and lesbian visibility by stamping money with the words “gay money” or “lesbian money” to show that we are part of society. I’ve personally decided to resurrect this concept.<\/p>\n
See, the money circulates and if enough of it gets stamped then, eventually, it’ll get to those places that want to shove us back into the closet (or worse). Maybe it’ll give a little breathing space to and reduce the isolation of some scared lesbian teenager handling money while doing some shitty, minimum wage in a place where she doesn’t have a support system. Maybe it’ll make someone who thinks she “doesn’t know any of ‘those’ people” give a little more thought to how her community is actually constructed.<\/p>\n
Activist groups and marketers have taken over the urban stickering campaign; indeed, Micro$oft was fined several hundred thousand dollars last year for stickering in Manhattan to promote the launch of the new version of MSN. Most activist groups get pinched because they want to direct someone to a URL to get more information about what ever issue it is they are stickering about and that URL gives the authorities an easy way to fix responsibility. <\/p>\n
But what about plain stickers that just say hope<\/span> on them? Or ones that say Question authority<\/span>, because we certainly need more of that to be happening.<\/p>\n Maybe it’s useless, I don’t know. All I do know is that I need to find a way to break my own paralysis, not so much to feel in control again — for we never really are in control of our lives — but more a way to not feel so fucking helpless about the world around me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of my duties at the new job is to open my boss’ mail. Since it’s both holiday card and end of the year appeal and donation season, there’s a lot of mail these days. One of the groups that we received a card from sent this very simple piece of natural brown card stock […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-175","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-thoughts","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}