blog021 We Are The Nation Of Avaaz

I feel glad about www.avaaz.org. ("Avaaz" means "voice" in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages.)

Avaaz emerged as a global nation of collaborating activists in 2007 with a simple democratic mission: organize Earthlings to close the gap between the world we have, and the world most people everywhere want.

With a population of nearly 14,000,000 (fourteen million!!!) Avaaz has become the 68th largest nation in the world, larger than Cambodia. We are larger than Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Cuba, or Bolivia.

Let this sink in past your mind for a moment.

If you have registered with Avaaz and participated in an action, you are a citizen of Avaaz.

With which structure are you more aligned? Your land-based corporate-controlled mega-government? Or your value-based global communication meshwork of activists?

We will soon be bigger than Ecuador, Mali, or Guatemala.

I want an Avaaz global passport.

What is the purpose of our country of Avaaz? We are a nation of activists enabling responsible conscious actions. The purpose of Avaaz, if I dare say it, is initiation into authentic adulthood, something long ago excluded from modern culture. The cost of putting adolescents in positions of financial, military, religious, and political power now impacts all life forms on planet Earth.

Avaaz empowers people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. We are helping each other to help each other. Our internet organising allows thousands of individual efforts, however small, to be rapidly combined into a powerful collective force.

[Avaaz is] "a transnational community that is more democratic, and could be more effective, than the United Nations."  -  Suddeutsche Zeitung

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Following is a letter I recently sent to Avaaz coordinators. It feels great just to have people to write such a letter to!

Dear Avaaz Team,

(and I stress the "Dear" part...)

Here are 3 questions:

1) It seems imperative that oil extraction from the Ecuadorian Amazon be FOREVER stopped, and oil companies punished and taken out of business for having already raped so much of the jungles and disrupted indigenous tribes and tropical ecologies. What stops Avaaz from maximizing action in Ecuador?

2) How can Avaaz empower people working in mainstream companies and the military and governments to simply quit their jobs, go home, and grow community gardens instead? Let's take the insane systems down. Please. For example, Avaaz can empower women to stop teaching their daughters to be slaves of the capitalistic patriarchal empire.The evolution could literally happen overnight when women say to their husbands: "Quit your job or you will never touch me again..." 

3) When does the Avaaz Global Homeschool for Sustainable Culture start? I want to be part of it.

Thank you so much for creating a global nation which gives the 99% some clout.

Clinton Callahan