cross-posted to my fanjournal

I have a very strange feeling that the old style of citizenship, where we watched our government's actions like witnesses at a slow-moving twenty-car pileup, throwing out e-mails and letters in a hysterical attempt to stop the madness, is over. Our days of knowing other people "take care of it" may also be over.

Why?

Barack Obama's website, Change.gov is up. It's a site Obama has spoken of before, in which the American people address their concerns directly to people who are paid to attend to them and to bring them to the attention of the president.

And Your Vision is where we start as people who want something better to become of this country than what it's been for the last eight years. (Or the last sixteen, or the last twenty-eight . . . some of us have been frustrated for a really long time.) He really believes in starting at the bottom, at the community level, because he knows it works.

No one is being promised that they'll get their own way, or that government will respond to everyone. That's impossible. But we get a voice.

For the first time ever the president-elect, the first head of our state to truly understand the power of the Internet, has reached out on the Internet and made a space where his government is present and listening. In some ways the Internet and its members funded his campaign, volunteered for it, campaigned for him, and won his office. Now he's saying that the involvement doesn't stop there, possibly because he knows we're still watching and hoping. He wants our feedback.

I never thought I was a geek before. Now I know that I am, because my first reaction is to say, This is the kewlest thing EVAHR!!!!!

And my second reaction is to say, I'll do what this guy asks of me. He's opening whole new doors for us, and we're going to use them!