Friday, March 13, 2009

Heading to DC for Our Spring Break

By: Harry Waisbren

I am headed to our nation's capital for a Campus Progress sponsored anti-war alternative spring break entitled Our Spring Break this Monday, and saying that I am merely excited would be quite the understatement! I have been working with the lead organizers on this project as a member of the Campus Progress Iraq committee for a few months now, and especially after meeting them in person I have been convinced that Robby Diesu and Paul Blasenheim in particular are going to become increasingly integral youth activists for the progressive movement moving forward.

Granted I was just in DC a few weeks ago for Power Shift, but that phenomenal event (which I will be writing more about in the days ahead) only got me more psyched to get back there and continue organizing the ambitious new media projects I have been working on. Power Shift, unlike any other youth organizing project I have been a part of, truly embraced new media as a way to engage and motivate the 12,000 students who were able to make it (and countless more following from home). I was able to take part through a web-video project entitled Break Silence that I have been working on for some time now, and this gets me back to why this trip will be such a boon for everything I've got going on.

The Break Silence project is very wide and high reaching, and I am hoping it can develop enough to encompass the giant and unacceptable gap that exists between student activism and the phenomenal online organizing occurring throughout the internet (especially within the progressive blogosphere). It is more than unfortunate that the activists with the maximum amount of time to participate and the most knowledge of new media are not being engaged for the most powerful and important progressive activism going on in the country, and I'm hoping to do my part to fix this problem!

I'll be blogging much more about this in the coming days as I attempt to utilize Our Spring Break as a case study for how this can be accomplished, so stay tuned!

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