Dear Reader,

My Facebook engagement lasted less than 24 hours.

I was one of the many whom, during the social networking website’s early development when two profiles first began to link to one another through a declaration of a relationship status, light-heartedly proposed an “engagement” to a female friend from high school.

As a new student at college where not everyone I knew was familiar with the nature of my relationship to my freshly declared “fiancé” and perhaps because these “comical
engagements” were not quite as rampant as they currently are, my relationship status caused confusion. I received several inquiries about “the lucky lady” as well as a sweet but misguided congratulatory email for my impending nuptials.

The 2008 YP4 Summit was amazing! I had a lot of time to reflect on everything that I had the opportunity to observe and experience. One of the first impactful events at the summit for me was the Power Shuffle exercise. Here was MY reaction:

Hello my fellow…uh…fellows!

This is my debut into the YP4 blogging world. From this
point on, I hope to contribute to the growing conversation between Young People
For fellows, dealing with all of our very important issues. What I want to
share with you today, however, is simply a message of hope, encouragement, and
most importantly one of love. I don’t normally speak in the abstract…so we’ll
see how this turns out.

Because the last fifty years have produced phases of rapid political change and massive political reaction, activists in the US today are faced with an unprecedented political reality. This new political reality requires new theoretical and organizational innovations in the same way that new personal problems require new ways of solving them. However, very few left or progressive activists and intellectuals have discussed the need to develop new theories to solve these problems.  Instead, many have continued to uncritically apply the ideas of Marx to the US while others have tried to recapture the spirit of the 1960s by modeling activism after successful 60s organizations that lacked a rigorous program for political development.  Aware that I run the risk of being labeled apolitical and individualistic, this week I'm following the words of Martin Luther King and suggesting that activism must begin with the application of love to the current political reality thereby creating a radical revolution in values, which could cause us to think about politics in entirely new ways.      

This is something that came to me late Monday night. I had to share it with you. I believe that our country in is in a crisis. We need to come together. That is all I can say this morning...

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As Love, that is why It is the longing of Love, I feel so many different things being in DC working with all of these progressive students.  It is rather funny to think that so many people think on the same level that I do.....The world is going to evolve at a fast rate and due to the people that I am meeting here.