Anthropologist, Dr. Michael Wesch, makes plain the power of not your computer, but the social media device that you’re currently sitting in front and using…

Though very early on in his presentation, pause the video and seriously take a moment and think about the statistics that he provides regarding ABC as compared to YouTube.

One minute you’re eating your oatmeal, the next minute you’re not. One minute you’re walking down the street, the next minute you’re just another statistic that the world doesn’t want to hear about because there are already far too many statistics.

In a letter to James Madison in early 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote - “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Truer words were never spoken, and one wonders where that spirit has gone. It seems to me that four decades ago the world was on fire with thought, on fire with discussion, and venturing out in bold social directions because of injustices and hypocrisies faced. Indeed, the time was ripe for a little rebellion, though, in my opinion, it was never truly capitalized on.

Here we find ourselves four decades later, a hundred years and more after a century that saw the birth of some of the most radical thought in human history, in an era replete with the abuse of power, of premeditated wars, of genocides that are all but ignored, and you could, for all intents and purposes, hear a pin drop.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been a few glimmers of hope. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, more people protested against it on a global scale than at any time in human history. Unfortunately, once it began, that level of enthusiasm vanished. And while there are countless global initiatives focused on a wide range of issues, such as the genocide occurring in Darfur, there doesn’t seem to be any immediacy or impassioned defiance involved. We have, in many ways, come to view outrage as something best limited to those parameters perceived to be ‘workable’, and in doing so have considerably diminished our own sense of power.

No government on earth can quell or contain a populist movement once it begins in earnest. They may delay it for a time, they might even use force to deter it, but if the people possess unyielding conviction then there is no power on earth that can stop them. Because for every gun held in the hands of a government soldier, there are thousands beyond to remove that weapon. A clip only holds so many bullets, and certainly not a thousand of them. To combat a population to such a degree as to use lethal force to its fullest extent cannot even stop a people united. It may destroy them, but it cannot defeat their desire to see change affected. For with the decimation of the people comes the reality that there is nothing to govern save empty, charred earth.

To confront the status quo is to confront the proposition that conveniences and comforts will be lost in the process if real change is to occur. It means that the very lifestyle that we cling to has to be brought into question and examined for what it truly is – a mechanism of control, one that survives primarily through the exploitation of others secured in a variety of ways.

We live in free societies, yet do not have access to unspotted information. We live in free societies in which conflicts can be justified using the very same methods employed by those that we historically view as vile. We live in free societies in which dissent is viewed as unpatriotic forgetting that in the context of such societies it is the one element that must never be forsaken.

If we can put a man on the moon, look at the surface of other planets using robots, and create weapons that have the ability to destroy the world if used in number, then we have the ability to affect change. For if our greatest accomplishments are limited to the scope of the former, then the latter becomes our greatest failure - the insurance of the demise of freedom itself.