It is not my place to say it, but I will anyway, because I want to acknowledge the tremendous effort that was made on behalf of the #tippingpoint collective blog and twitter action yesterday.
Liz Jarvis has posted here on BritMums how it went, so I won't steal that thunder other than to say I am reeling from the numbers that the campaign reached even before the big push at 4 - 5pm.
So, thankyou to everyone who posted, tweeted, re-tweeted, read the posts, read the tweets,signed petitions. And thankyou most especially to Liz and to Kate, who took notice of a tweet sent in a state of shock and translated it into positive action.
It could be argued that yesterday we made not a jot of difference in real terms. But I don't agree. If we did nothing else, we showed that events like those in Houla matter to ordinary people.
The horror that leads us as parents to turn the page on bad news, to switch channels when the images become too upsetting, to zone out from stories we just can't - just don't want to - deal with (because what, as individuals living so far from these ghastly events, could we possibly hope to change?) could - by those who are immediately affected by and living surrounded by such atrocities - be seen as indifference. It isn't, of course it isn't. It's just us trying to do the best we can with the circumstances we live in, in our here and now.
Once confronted with the facts, no-one could be indifferent. And although raising our voices in collective protest, as we did yesterday, and encouraging others to do the same, may not seem like much to us as we resume our comfortable lives today, as a direct result of what a very specific section of the blogging and tweeting community achieved, an audience of what was possibly close on one million people are now uncomfortably aware of what happened in Houla in a way they weren't before.
Their eyes have been opened, their bubbles' burst. And who knows? As a result of the added impetus that gives, change may follow. For the sake of a couple of posts and a few tweets, it was a chance worth taking.
Liz Jarvis has posted here on BritMums how it went, so I won't steal that thunder other than to say I am reeling from the numbers that the campaign reached even before the big push at 4 - 5pm.
So, thankyou to everyone who posted, tweeted, re-tweeted, read the posts, read the tweets,signed petitions. And thankyou most especially to Liz and to Kate, who took notice of a tweet sent in a state of shock and translated it into positive action.
It could be argued that yesterday we made not a jot of difference in real terms. But I don't agree. If we did nothing else, we showed that events like those in Houla matter to ordinary people.
The horror that leads us as parents to turn the page on bad news, to switch channels when the images become too upsetting, to zone out from stories we just can't - just don't want to - deal with (because what, as individuals living so far from these ghastly events, could we possibly hope to change?) could - by those who are immediately affected by and living surrounded by such atrocities - be seen as indifference. It isn't, of course it isn't. It's just us trying to do the best we can with the circumstances we live in, in our here and now.
Once confronted with the facts, no-one could be indifferent. And although raising our voices in collective protest, as we did yesterday, and encouraging others to do the same, may not seem like much to us as we resume our comfortable lives today, as a direct result of what a very specific section of the blogging and tweeting community achieved, an audience of what was possibly close on one million people are now uncomfortably aware of what happened in Houla in a way they weren't before.
Their eyes have been opened, their bubbles' burst. And who knows? As a result of the added impetus that gives, change may follow. For the sake of a couple of posts and a few tweets, it was a chance worth taking.
