Ask not
Kathryn Cramer lays out specific and realistic steps that the net community (that means you) can take to head off the nuclear confrontation brewing in Iran:
- Help improve Google Earth coverage of Iran, "so a housewife in Pleasantville or Tokyo can look at and speculate about the purpose of suspicious looking ventilation shafts. Having such imagery publicly available will also slow down our own warmongers when they realize that that same housewife can do damage assessments on areas they might choose to nuke.
- Find ways to bypass the Iranian net censorship apparatus. Free flow of information could help avert a war, and if war comes it will help save civilians.
- Throw together open source, free translation tools too and from Farsi.
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Instead of wringing h
er hands over the evident foolishness of the Bush administration, Cramer proposes several specific things we can do now to help make war less probable and to save people should war come anyway.It might not turn out that way, but Kathryn's modest proposal has an outside chance of being a historic post. Get out your scrapbooks.