The roller coaster that is IndieGoGo

      It's early in the morning in east Tennessee. It's very quiet. Too quiet for me. I have posted my IndieGoGo link on Facebook several times over the last three weeks. Have gotten three donations from close friends, but that is it.
      I have got a few weeks to turn this puppy around. Will start sending the crowd funding link to the hundreds and hundreds who have contacted me because they watched my YouTube video about Oak Ridge.

Here are the links:

forgivenessonline - YouTube

forgivenessonline -- Indiegogo

 

Leprechauns at Rockefeller Center In New York

      Rumor has it that this morning a small Leprechaun with a green mohawk roamed the canyons of Rockefeller Center hoping to snag some airtime on The Today Show. A leprechaun, the dictionary tells me, is a small mischievous sprite. That's a perfect description.
      This kind of punked-up version of an Irish prankster, hoped to promote a 5K run this St. Patricks' Day in Oak Ridge. She had a sign to flash at the TV audience. At the bottom, she was kind enough to provide the website address for my newly posted site.
       Everything was going according to plan until said Leprechaun, with entourage in tow, arrived at Rockefeller Center. The sprinting little spirit was determined to force The Today Show, into an unexpected direction.
       But powerful social media forces had other plans. Over 10,000 screeching teenage girls had jammed into Rockefeller Center to make certain that The Today Show went in One Direction and one direction only. Over 10,000 vials of 16 year old estrogen cannot be ignored. Plans were abandoned. Green mohawks are powerful things, particularly with St. Pat's approaching, but 10,000 squealing girls??? There are limits to what even sprites can do when a hot new boy band comes to town.

      I can't make this stuff up. At least she tried. Plenty of stories to tell at the 5K run on Saturday!

forgivenessonline website 

There He Goes Again!

      Your time is precious, I don't want to waste it, but you folks need a little background about the people who are critics of the bombing of Japan. There is a small group of academics who are called "the revisionist historians." Their title tells all. This is what they believe.

• Japan, in the summer of 1945, was on the verge of collapse, and surrender
• The United States KNEW Japan was on the verge of collapse
• We bombed them anyway, just to bully the Russians

      Over two-thirds of Americans, when last polled, believed the bombings were necessary. You would never know this from tracking the major news outlets. The revisionists dominate the conversation, and they have for decades.
      The Godfather of the revisionists is Professor Gar Alperovitz. His book, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, is the bible for revisionists. Published in 1995 it reflects over 30 years of research. I have read it. Felt it a duty to do so. The body of the text is 668 pages. With notes, index and acknowledgments it comes in at 847 pages.
       Professor Alperovitz recently had an op/ed piece on the website of The Washington Post. It is a very true reflection of his beliefs.  Here is the link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/from-the-atom-bomb-to-attacking-iran-a-leadership-lesson-for-obama-from-our-nuclear-history/2012/03/07/gIQA7Pu2wR_story.html

      Hope you enjoy it. The sixth paragraph begins, "Although documentation is sketchy......." That describes the professor perfectly.

Unintended Consequences

      Started a fund drive at IndieGoGo.com a few weeks back. Set it up before the drive really started, so I could work out all the wrinkles across platforms. Still a few wrinkles, but it is working.
      Part of the donation process at IndieGoGo is that donations can be made anonymously. Or, donations can be made in the name of another person. And the amount of the donation can be hidden too. So, at the end of the drive, I could get thousands of donations anonymously, or in the name of others, or in the name of fictitious folks or, in amounts that are unknown. In the secret city, most of the funding could be secret. Hidden. In the shadows. It seems fitting, doesn't it?

A Bazzilion Things to Do

      Pretty well buried this morning. Website building, twittering, learning about forming an LLC in Tennessee, building a national media campaign, rewriting my 18 minute TEDxNashville speech, forming a strategy for a social media campaign and finally, working on the "crowd funding" project at IndieGoGo.com for the next 102 days.
      Doing all this while working full time at another unrelated job. I am NOT complaining. Nobody is forcing me to do this. I've brought this on myself.
      Focusing on what is important is critical. You know how you eat an 800 pound elephant? One bite at a time.

With a little help from my friends.

        Feeling a bit over-whelmed right now. Have started a "crowd funding" effort on IndieGoGo. Want to find 5,000 people to donate $20 each by June 14th. The silence has been deafening. 

      Working on a presentation for TEDxNashville at the end of this month. I have been nominated, but still don't know if I have been accepted. The odds are very long, but the opportunity is huge, so the effort is worth it. TED talks are limited to 18 minutes. That is hardly any time at all. It goes by really fast. Again, the silence from Nashville has been deafening.

      Also, I am working on a website at forgivenessonline.info so I can have a hub for all my Internet efforts. I am building the website myself because the bids I got to have it done from web designers were through the roof. The only capital assets I have are between my ears. 

      The challenges for me are daunting. I want to change how the nation looks at the bombings of Hiroshima of Nagasaki. There are two legacies from the bombings: one is that we did a horrific thing, the other, is that those bombings ended the war.

      For over 50 years our nation has only focused on one of the legacies: the horrific bombings. This is historically shallow and intellectually dishonest in the extreme.

      The hurdles in front of me are huge, but I know this project is the right thing to do. With a little help from my friends, it will happen.

A not totally unrelated post to my screenplay

REBUILDING AN ICON, WORD BY WORD

 In June 2009, Let the Great World Spin appeared on bookshelves. With its publication, author Colum McCann returned a national symbol, The World Trade Center, back to its owners: the citizens of the United States.

It was a courageous act of imaginative recovery and repair. Hijackers on 9/11 destroyed a national symbol of capitalism and transformed it into an international icon of American hopelessness and helplessness.

McCann, working word by word, and phrase by phrase, used the mystery of language to rebuild The World Trade Center into a national memorial to hope and redemption. His book won the 2009 National Book Award.

McCann was living in Manhattan in 2001. His father-in-law was working at The World Trade Center on 9/11. He escaped safely. The Dublin born writer aspired to write a novel about 9/11, wanted to examine his adopted city, hoped to meld fact and fiction into a gripping narrative about the unbounded potential of the human spirit. His solution was as ingenious as it was audacious.

The centerpiece of the novel is the real life story of a daring acrobatic performance which riveted New York City on August 7, 1974. In the early morning darkness Philippe Petit and his cronies snuck into the partially finished colossus in south Manhattan and headed for the roof.

Using technology straight out of Greek mythology, they shot an arrow from a hunting bow to get rope to co-conspirators on the other tower roof. They pulled a wire taut between the towers and Petit stepped out onto that wire-thin barrier between life and death. 

He performed a 40 minute show for the growing crowd of New Yorkers over 1,350 feet below. They were mesmerized and with good reason. He leapt, he danced and he astonished those far below. He wore no safety harness. There was no net to catch him. 

McCann’s brilliance shines in using Petit’s dance in the heavens to illuminate the lives of over a dozen fictional characters who witness it. An Irish priest chases redemption by helping prostitutes get through their days of squalor and menace. He sees a divine angel on the wire.

A support group of grieving mothers who lost sons in Vietnam wrestle with Petit, a man who cheapens life by taunting death. A computer whiz-kid on the west coast, hacks into the phone system, wanting to get an eye witness account from a slightly bemused librarian who picks up the ringing pay phone, foreshadowing with subtle humor the Internet to come. 

Story lines interweave and stray off, only to always come back to the artist floating on a wire.  The novel is sprawling and hugely ambitious while covering both only a single day and only a relatively slight 349 pages. A post script takes readers to 2006 and our post 9/11 world. 

The book transformed me, but I cannot explain how McCann wove his magic in me. 

After 9/11, I dreaded seeing photos of the World Trade Center. The image always took me back to that horrific day and I would fall into a well of sadness that had no bottom.  The hijackers defined the symbol for me. 

After finishing Let the Great World Spin, I saw the world in a new way: this is the essential purpose of literature. When I see photos now, I start to fall into that well of sadness but, in my mind’s eye I suddenly see a Frenchman on a wire. The silhouette represents both the acrobat who defied gravity and the immigrant writer who defied the hijackers’ determination to destroy hope. 

I regain my balance and I do not fall into that well of sadness. I am hopeful again. 

Petit and McCann are both immigrants. They see America through the unique lens of adoption. Native born Americans can take this country for granted. Immigrants aren’t blinded by a birthright.

Petit’s physical fearlessness created what has been called the greatest artistic crime of the last century. McCann’s creative fearlessness in this century sculpted a work of hope and redemption out of the twisted wreckage of The World Trade Center.

We thought the hijackers robbed us of  a national symbol. We were wrong. The hijackers  borrowed it for awhile. With publication of Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann gave us back The World Trade Center. He gave us back our hope.

 We all owe this Irish immigrant a debt of gratitude.