Bessa in poppies

Reading about disasters, wars, suffering of every kind through the screen of written news or television.. the information has always been there but the information has never been so immediate, so graphic and so personal.

Because Twitter does feel personal, it is personal conversations, personal connections as well as news a full day ahead of most traditional news sources.

One reason I had been following events in Bahrain as closely as I was that night is because of JustAmira, Amira Al Hussaini. I had been reading her blog,  and the night I watched the Twitter stream in horror as the protestors were overrun in Pearl Roundabout, Amira’s heartbreak  was evident. Ethan Zuckerman wrote a post on his blog about that – Watching Bahrain through a friends’s eyes, heartbroken which describes that better than anything I could write because he actually does know Amira..

And she has cats.

@JustAmira Amira Al Hussaini

Smokey after hearing Gaddafi speak http://yfrog.com/gzt7yynj

(If you saw any clips of that speech you’ll understand Smokey’s reaction)

I have cats too. Too many cats some might say. At the moment we have Little Cat (the Zen Kitty), Buddy, Tyler, Bessa and Snickers.

Little Cat is diabetic, recently diagnosed. He practices feline non-violence for all living creatures except for very small spiders and moths.

He is actually my son’s cat and will move back over to my house in Thetford when Chris gets home along with Buddy the obese, demented calico.  I’ll miss his extra special slow motion serenity but I will keep my smudgy nosed Tyler and the little Bessa. It’s a tossup which household will have to deal with Snickers.

I commented on Mr. Zuckerman’s blog that it was a stupid thing to make me fell close to Amira, but that it did anyway and a couple other commenters disagreed. One said it was a rapid sharing of knowledge to know that the other was a cat person. I actually think that’s true, now.

And then, last night, another “tweep” (I still am not into the lingo) named Ali Seif that I have been following for several weeks now, posted some links to pictures of his hometown, Beirut (a beautiful city) and before you could say spit others were tweeting – “here’s a picture of my village in Scotland”, the “view from my grandfather’s land in Syria”, “my hometown in Florida” – and I could not resist, I sent a link to our dirt road in Thetford and a picture of the beaver pond one snowy morning several years ago.  It was a global sharing that was very powerful, very beautiful.

I know that since that snowy night, sitting in my living room in my tiny township in Vermont when I listened to Mona Seif’s phone call my life has changed, and I think it’s more than just me. It’s the video message of support that the Independent Egyptian Unions sent to the protestors in Wisconsin and the Facebook page set up by a pizza joint in Madison where you can order a pizza to be delivered to the Statehouse there to feed them, which has gotten orders from a ton of countries as well as all 50 of our states. It’s people to people and I think it’s beautiful.