Here are the rules:"1. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about...and give your picture a short title.2. Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt" and link back to this blog entry.3. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce."
Freedom
I don't generally do memes. It's not that I don't enjoy them - I love reading your memes, I get a chuckle, or I feel connected...but for whatever reason, I don't usually take the time to do them myself, but this one, I could not resist.
I found this photograph on Flickr and immediately this meme came to mind and so, I asked permission to for this photo to appear on my blog. The artist has many other exquisite photos, but this one just leapt from the page; illustrating a passion of mine. Without the ability to identify, locate, store and retrieve information we are little more than slaves to those who would hand us truth. It doesn't matter if truth comes from the fundamentalist right, the extreme left, the center, the yadayadayaya whomever; we are reduced to the status of lambs, eternal children dependent on Papa Someone to guide us. Information Professionals call this, "Information Literacy." A term which I, passionate as I am about this reality, loathe. Why?
First, it implies that someone can be information illiterate. Hardly. The seeking, understanding, storing and retrieving information is hardwired into our evolution - we cannot NOT be information literate. Information Literacy to me is more like the secret decoder ring. I have one; most of you have one. Sometimes, my ring works a little bit faster than yours, sometimes I have a more accuate sharp shooter - but most times, I simply have it and lots of folks just don't have it. And that my friends, seems almost evil in its unfairness.
I've always been one to feel slightly uncomfortable when I have something that others don't. In a new car, I drive to work (let me see if I can remember this, it's been more than a decade) noticing all the hoopties around me and remembering the stress of days in uncertain and less than optimally safe transportation. It's just a quirk of mine...to wish that others have, at least potentially, all the good things that I have. I think everyone should have a secret decoder ring just because that's fair, that's honest, that's leveling the playing field. I'd like to call it alturism but really it isn't at all. Think about this:
All of "those folks" out there - you know the ones, the ones slightly different than us....maybe not quite as educated, or pretty, or healthy...all of those folks out there vote. Oh sure, maybe they don't go to the polls with the frequency that "we" do...but, if you consider this with just a slight tilt of the head; everything we do is casting a vote of some sort. We send our kids to school, a vote for education, we buy certain drugs, a vote for pharmaceuticals or research, we play softball with our neighbors, a vote for community and sportsmanship..you see? XXX Chemical company wants to build a plant in our backyard, and somehow, one way or another, we vote - and so do all of "those" people. Wouldn't you like to believe that their vote, while it may differ from yours, is well considered and reasonable? Would you like to opportunity to speak to them, using some medium, and know that your message can be deciphered and illicit a thoughtful response? That requires the secret decoder ring.
The truth shall make you free - but only if you can find it.
~Lee
All of that said, there's also the question of whether I am them or they are me or we are all together, but that's a post for another day.
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