I saw two interesting articles this morning that I wanted to comment on. The first was 
Our Velvet Revolution by Doris "Granny D" Haddock. It reminded me a bit of Silicon Snake-Oil: It is easy and safe to chatter with your like-minded friends on the net. It's another thing to go out and actually talk to people in your own local community. It's a much larger step to try to reach out to people in the disenfranchised communities beyond that. It's hard.
The other article was a Salon interview with Adam Hochschild. He's written a book about the Abolitionist movement and several bits from the introduction struck me as interesting parallels with the Esperanto movement
Adam Hochschild's new book, "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves," begins on May 22, 1787, when a dozen men met in a printing shop in London. They were trying to figure out how to persuade the rest of the country that slavery, a system that had been the norm for hundreds of years, was morally wrong. The meeting marked the beginning of British abolitionism, the first real human rights campaign and what would become the template for the activist movements that followed it. There was no precedent for what they set out to do, and yet, within 51 years, this group managed to eradicate slavery from the largest colonial empire in the world.
[...]
Rather than simply inform, Hochschild makes it his duty to impress upon the reader just how many people, ideas and tactics the abolition movement needed to be successful. It's a worthy reminder of the effort it takes to change the world.
[...]
The characters are wonderfully weird, for abolitionists, almost by definition, were oddballs.
The last bit in particular. I'll have to get a copy of the book and see if there are some things to be learned here.
StevenBrewer