I can't agree more. My family has one of each: I write code and am the technical weenie where my wife is a do-gooder trying to change laws to treat kids differently than adults.
I'm absolutely in awe of what her tiny four person organization is able to accomplish: they do research, talk to legislators, write reports, testify in the state senate, organize with other groups. They do all this while watching and analyzing local news to calculate its impact on the voting probabilities in the state congress. All of this while making 20-25% of what they'd be paid in private practice.
That's all fine and dandy, but the real kicker is how successful they are: their last effort passed 154-0 in the house: unanimous.
So you can sit around and turn your Facebook avatar any color you want and pretend it matters. I take great solace in the fact that there are people out there actually changing the world.
A lot of 'nerds' are actually politically active with the Pirate movement. The difference is that it's 100x more difficult to pass a single law when you're trying to change stuff like copyright laws. And over 99.9% of people active in the movement are getting paid 0$/h.
I'm absolutely in awe of what her tiny four person organization is able to accomplish: they do research, talk to legislators, write reports, testify in the state senate, organize with other groups. They do all this while watching and analyzing local news to calculate its impact on the voting probabilities in the state congress. All of this while making 20-25% of what they'd be paid in private practice.
That's all fine and dandy, but the real kicker is how successful they are: their last effort passed 154-0 in the house: unanimous.
So you can sit around and turn your Facebook avatar any color you want and pretend it matters. I take great solace in the fact that there are people out there actually changing the world.