Love Among the Landmines: an epiphany

Photos

Landmine survivor at the Mae Sot Clinic on the Myanmar Border with Thailand

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The photo was impossible not to notice.

If you watch the constant stream of news stories that come in to NowPublic from our 30,000 contributors worldwide, something's bound to capture your attention.

Today, it was a powerful contribution from a new member, James Hathaway, a volunteer with Clear Path International, an NGO that provides assistance to victims of landmines in Southeast Asia. Truly, it's an act of love.

But what initially grabbed my attention was the photograph attached to the story.

We get lots of photographs at NowPublic, many of them of fun things that people have done, places they've been to, or things they have seen in their neighborhoods. They are a joy to behold.

But this picture - it had the unmistakable aura of a first-hand experience with tragedy. Following it through to its source, I found myself at Clear Path's Flickr photostream. In a wordless journey, you see first-hand fresh images of the horrendous suffering that landmines are creating daily.

Reaching out

So I used the handy email contact form at NowPublic and sent James a note of my thanks.

In a flash, I found myself talking to a guy after my own heart, a Vermonter who puts in a lot of time volunteering.

Back in Southeast Asia, he has bloggers in Thailand and Viet Nam who send him regular reports from the field. These go up to Clear Path's website. The only way the carnage is going to stop, he knows, is when enough people around the world pay attention, but the website is only one of a billion or so, and the landmine issue is one of thousands that compete for our attention.

So it's a bit of a puzzler.

Last night, James discovered NowPublic. By 3:30am, Vermont time, he posted his first story.

By 4:30am PDT, I discovered James.

I got to meet Thien, Colvin and Chi, through their pictures at Flickr.

My world had changed, in an important, fundamental way.

The marvel of networks

At NowPublic, we talk a lot about the power of social networks. We marvel at the success of YouTube, the weird goings-ons at MySpace, and the recent turmoil at Facebook. It's all exciting, entertaining, and important. We're proud to be part of how the web is changing the world.

But this early morning introduction to Clear Path produced an early morning epiphany for me - and as we all know, in the dark of the night these insights come with extraordinary force.

Yes - we're proud to be part of how the web is changing the world - but more important, we're awestruck about how our contributors are changing us.

I thought about this and did a Google News Search for landmines. You'll see a quote from one of the stories I found, below.

Friends, we're all part of everything now. We never knew what would be the impact of connecting millions of hearts and minds into a global conscience.

We are just beginning to find out.

It's love among the landmines.

Mark Schneider is Managing Editor of NowPublic. He can be reached by clicking on his member name, below, and going to his profile page. You can reach each other that way too - without giving up your personal email address.

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