Revolution by Hashtag

Genuine national movements – those that involve a major part of the population, used to be pretty rare. I am old enough to remember the last ones, which really got going some 50 years ago. The civil rights movement swept the South, and anger over injustice and assassination swept north and west, and cities burned. Then the whole country seemed to turn against the Vietnam War, forcing President Johnson to give up the idea of running for a new term. There were revolutions in sexual mores, and clothing. Men’s hair got longer and women’s skirts shorter. Culturally, we would never be the same again.

Half a century on, the #metoo movement is one of those revolutionary culture-changers. And now there is #neveragain, teens leading the charge for gun control. Though the subterranean forces of change have been at work all along, these movements have erupted like wildfires racing through dry brush, thanks to ubiquitous connectivity and that previously little-used thing on our keypads, the hashtag.

More people are hitting the streets for more reasons than ever before. Certainly, more are running for office than ever before. It seems like history is being made constantly now. We don’t have to wait for the future judgment of historians as to whether any of it was important enough to make it into their books.

As is often pointed out, one big modern challenge is dealing with the compression of events in time. Things that took decades gradually only took years, then only months, then only weeks. Today, even the so-called 24-hour news cycle seems too long. And, of course, another challenge is that the hashtag is a tool available to anyone, including those who may not have what we might think of as benign intentions. They could start their own revolutions.

For the moment, though, the most dangerous place to stand is on the wrong side of one of these hashtags. We will only get run over.

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