What We Can Do

I was excited to vote for Obama this past November.  Now I am excited for him to actually be our president.  As I wrote back then, I hope that he will an unleash “a tidal wave of involvement, innovation and improvement."   For that to succeed, we the people have to be that tidal wave.

We all have to ask ourselves what we can do. It has been great to see posts to that effect, including Fred’s post on selflessness and Alex’s post on 7 Online Things To Do To Restore America.  So here are three things that I am planning to get going on:

• Donate.  The recession has brought real hardship to a lot of families.  This doesn’t have to be cash.  We will be going through our house and donating clothing, toys, sports equipment.  But if you want to make a difference with cash, donorschoose.org is my favorite place (and education is critical for our long term success).

• Use less energy / support clean energy.  Even if everyone does just a bit, it will have a meaningful impact on our energy consumption.  I will start by finally replacing all the old bulbs around the house, adding a bunch of smartstrips and switching our electricity supplier to one using mostly renewable energy sources.

• Be honest and speak up.  Many of the tough spots that we are finding ourselves in are the result of folks either being outright dishonest or at least not speaking up.  It’s easy to point at the Bush administration and at executives on Wall Street, but we all have moments where it seems a lot easier to just say nothing.  As Alex wrote there are many ways and venues of doing that, including now the new White House web site.   I will try to do my little bit on this blog and in my personal interactions.

We have a new start, now let’s all create that wave!