How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Henry David Thoreau

I might have hesitated to blog. I certainly don’t tweet.  I thought: It’s just not me.  Social media, you understand, is so… common, vacuous, and too often badly written.

But my sneer slips when confronted with the fact that people are being murdered for expressing themselves through Twitter, Facebook, personal blogs.  People are being threatened, terrorized, disappeared, shot in the head, chopped into pieces.  If anything can bring home the validity of social media, it is that courageous and honest writers are speaking out, via their blogs and tweets, about the injustices engulfing their fellow human beings and that their enemies will do everything possible to silence these truths.

In October, a Mexican drug cartel murdered María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, aka FELINA, who had taken on the job of informing her fellow citizens, via Twitter, of “…extortion, kidnappings, shootouts, arson, bodies excavated from arid pits…”; mere daily events in a society run by organized crime.  Because the newspapers refused the responsibility and the risk, FELINA used Twitter to the uncover stories that were being suppressed.  That same crime syndicate took over her Twitter account to announce her death at their hands. (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29746651)

Then there were the three Bangladesh bloggers—Avijiti Roy, Washiqur Rahman, and Ananta Bijoy Das—who wrote about their personal codes of behavior and belief which were secular, humanist, and unpopular amongst their god fearing, control mongering murderers. (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-32701207)   Mr. Roy’s daughter, Trisha Ahmed released a statement on her U.S. Facebook account: “I think [my father’s] story should be heard in the US because Bangladesh is powerless; it’s corrupt, there is no law and order, and I highly doubt that any justice will come to the murderers.”

I know nothing that would interest a drug lord.  I have no clout when it comes to turning people to or from any god-head.  But I have a mind and it tends toward independent thinking.  I am a Jew, an atheist, a female, a writer.  So, if you must, sharpen your machetes; there’s another blogger on the loose.