ephemera

thewordunheard:

Sitting in a Media Advocacy class—about 30 Ivy-educated adults—and the professor put up this photograph and asked us who knew what event this was. I was the only person who knew that it was the March for Women’s Lives in 2004.

I was there with my family and my closest friends, and I remember it pretty much changing my life, and I remember being horrified the next day when I saw how no one—no one!—covered it. And I remember that changing my life in a different way: the stark realization that the media have the ability to shape our understanding of history, and the responsibility is on each of us to get our message out, because we can’t trust anyone else to do it for us.

There’s a lot of eye-rolling about the capital-I Internet and the advent of Web 2.0, but I can tell you now that if blogging was then what it is now, you all would have known we were there.

It’s horrifying to me that I don’t remember ever hearing about this. Excuse me while I go remedy that problem.