Sundays are for recovery, rest and tons homework. But for two inspired individuals, their Sunday turned into a day of protest. To those who drove down North Benson Road on Jan. 30, 2011 and saw two males yelling and holding signs saying ‘Honk if you are for democracy in Egypt,’ let’s hope you honked, or at least felt inspired.
In this day and age, we are constantly surrounded by technology and rarely stop and breathe. With text message, pictures, videos, television and the Internet consuming us, it is hard to know what’s really important.
Everybody knows that college students live in a bubble, which is strange to think of since we are more connected to the entire world around us. In seconds, we can donate money to a cause by text messaging, create a Facebook page, an event to rally our friends and find out how to feed our beta fish. Our dependence to technology is staggering and most would be lost without it – think MapQuest and Google Maps.
Yet in Egypt, the government has shut down the majority of Internet services and the citizens are left without a voice. American companies are working around the clock to help those in Egypt. Technology giants, Google and Twitter have found a way turn voicemails into tweets to help Egyptians transmit news to the rest of the world. Twitter once again is proving it’s not just for tweens and celebrities.
Technology is fun. It changes all the time, keeping us up to date with what our friends are feeling or where they are going. We don’t need to make plans ahead of time anymore because our friends can call or text to cancel five minutes before we are supposed to meet. That’s not unusual. None of use can make it through an English turbo if the Internet did not exist, let alone are cell phones.
But maybe instead of checking ‘attending’ on every Facebook event you receive you should instead stop driving your car by those protesting and stand next to them. It is one thing to say you want to attend and quite another to show up when it really matters.
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