The town of Portree, on the Isle of Skye in Scotland has a population of 2,149.
At the center of the town is a cenotaph, a memorial dedicated to those who have died in the First World War.
Almost every town in the UK has one of these (and you can find them throughout much of Europe).
Inscribed on the cenotaph are the names of the war dead.
In the little town of Portree, upon the cenotaph, are inscribed more than 125 names.
A terrible price to pay. Of the 557,000 Scots who enlisted in The First World War, 26.4% were killed. A whole generation wiped out.
Next month marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. There will be a great deal written about it. There already has been.
The British journalist Owen Jones recently tweeted:
There are, of course, mixed opinions, particularly after 100 years. But the sustaining concept remains of millions who died because of the decisions of a small handful of men.
The vast majority of people who die in any war, who pay the greatest price, have precious little to say about why that war is fought or how it is carried out.
Nicholas Kristoff, writing in today’s NY Times (Leading Through Great Loss) notes that the family of Naftali Fraenkel, one of three teens kidnapped and killed by Palestinians, and the father of Muhammed Abu Keider, the teen kidnapped and killed by Israelis, share a common opinion now:
“I call on both sides to stop the bloodshed.”
Alas, it is neither the Fraenkel family nor the Abu Keider family who make the decisions about war and peace. It is politicians.
But suppose this was not the case.
Suppose ‘average’ people could take control of enormous decisions like war that have such a massive impact on their lives.
For all of human history, this has been impossible. Wars were decided by Kings or Emperors or Presidents and the masses had little choice but to follow and become their cannon fodder. Power flowed from the top down.
Power flowed from the top down in pretty much everything, in fact. An elite few made all the decisions and everyone else’s job was to fall in line.
The Internet, however, has begun to alter this seemingly immutable equation, and this may be the greatest of its many disruptions to the way things have always been done.
Let’s take a look at the most successful online Internet companies:
Airbnb
Tripadvisor
eBay
YouTube
Wikipedia
They all have something in common.
They are all 100% created by User Generated Content.
There are no ‘professionals’ directing from above, telling the users what to do or what to buy. On the contrary, power flows upward from the user base.
This is revolutionary. And it works.
It works for sharing photographs or 140 character ideas or videos… and it be used to allow the Fraenkel family to talk directly to the Abu Keider family without the intercession or the opinions of politicians or the media?
And what would happen if a million Fraenkel families, prior to a personal tragedy, were able to talk directly to a million Abu Keider families? Do you think that they might discover that they had more in common than they had in difference? Do you think they might discover that not every Israeli wishes every Palestinian dead? That not every Palestinian wishes every Israeli dead?
Do you think that if, during the months leading up to the First World War, a million families in Britain had been able to talk directly to a million families in Germany, that most of them would have not only been opposed to going to war, but might have found more common ground than their politicians were able to do?
That possibility now exists. There are more than 1.4 billion smart phones in circulation around the world. They are more than places where people can watch Netflix movies or play Candy Crush. They are nodes of communication between people who have never been able to talk to one another before. The tool is in your hands.
And once you start to talk to ‘the enemy’, you might just discover that he or she is not all that different from you. What this does is eliminate the politician from the equation. And that might not be so bad an idea.
Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2014
