Another reason to love #socialmedia

Those of you who have followed for awhile know that I am very circumspect about posting political stuff here. I confine my own political blogging to a narrow set of issues, and I try to keep Sourcerer’s content 85% pop-culture oriented. That’s because I built this blog for two reasons:

To be fun; and
To promote creative work that deserves more attention than it’s getting.

That said, political science is my primary academic discipline. Political sociology and power relationships in general fascinate me, and I keep up with what my government is doing, which means I read a lot of political writing. I love, especially, to read what liberal Southerners and what women have to say about politics.

So, I am very happy to have discovered Deep South Progressive today. I share some local connections with them. If I were going to devote my blogging career entirely to politics, the blog I’d want to build would look a lot like Deep South Progressive. I never would have discovered them if not for social media. First a quote from their about page, then I’ll tell you how I stumbled upon them.

While the mainstream media often portrays states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina as hopelessly lost in the past, we insist that our region’s future is filled with hope and promise. We believe that beneath the corruption of the politics of the past, there is a progressive energy locked within the heart of the Deep South, and it’s just waiting to be unleashed.

We are providing an alternative to the mainstream media narrative by emphasizing the stories, events, and people that are all changing the way people think, live, and vote in the Deep South.

When I read that, the first thing that popped into my mind was this, from Diana’s post earlier in the week:

One of my pet peeves is the idea that the South is a homogeneous land of discrimination and bigots. I’ve lived in the South for my entire life, and I’ve managed to become a liberal woman with a graduate degree. There are many of us here who aren’t getting behind acts like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. We’re trying to make our voices heard. There’s a protest planned at the Mississippi Capitol Building on March 26. My social media accounts have been abuzz with petitions and awareness about the detriment this bill could cause.

Change isn’t happening overnight. In fact, it seems like we’re on a see-saw, a scale that just cannot balance itself. But we’re working on it. Even if it was by a small margin, the Proposition 26 Amendment (Personhood) didn’t pass by popular vote. Hattiesburg just recently passed a law, similar to one that passed in Starkville, affirming diversity inclusion. We’re working on it. And that’s a large reason that I won’t leave the South. I cannot. I have a responsibility to help make it a better place.

To me, it seems that Diana and Deep South Progressive are going about the same thing in their own ways, and I am on board. So, even though you don’t see a ton of political writing at Sourcerer, I try to find ways to support things like this. I followed Deep South Progressive on Facebook and Twitter today, sent them an email, recommended them to some friends, and asked Diana to add them to the interest list she maintains on Facebook to keep up with blogs. I’ll give them Follow Fridays, Tweet their best stuff to @MondayBlogs, and comment on their work when I have something useful to say about it.

I think it’s important to support blogs like Deep South Progressive, because our public discourse is better off for them, and because they remind Southern liberals that we are not alone. There are actually a lot of us — we just don’t really like to organize.

Now, as to how I discovered Deep South Progressive. I bought my wife a laptop for her birthday and set her up WordPress and Twitter accounts. I did that because I want to share my online life with her, and I think she’ll enjoy getting to know many of the bloggers I talk to regularly. My stepdaughter also set up a Twitter account this weekend, and she knows one of the people who run Deep South Progressive. She sent me a link, and I took one look and decided to contact them.

So, just helping a couple of family members who are genuinely interested get connected to my network has already gotten me an introduction to a group of bloggers who share many of my interests and who have connections to my local community. How cool is that?

I’ll have a post of my own on the “Religious Freedom” bill this week, and another installment of my Tolkien series. We’ll also have plenty of our usual fare, so do tune in.