Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey

An adventure, not a burden

Enough about hate, now it's time to talk about love.

Check out this phenomenal acceptance speech by Bono at the recent NAACP awards [via Malcolm]. Not only does it put our struggles into perspective amongst the incredible pain and suffering of those around us and far away, but it reminds us love isn't an emotion or a state of mind — it's a verb, a call to action.

Here are some excerpts...

True religion won't let us fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom.

"Love thy neighbor" is not a piece of advice, it's a command. And that means that in the global village, we're going to have to start loving a whole lot more people.

His truth is marching on.

Where you live should not determine whether you live or whether you die.

God has a special place for the poor. The poor are where God lives. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is where the opportunity is lost and lives are shattered. God is with the mother who has infected her child with the virus that will take both their lives. God is in the rubble and the cries we hear during wartime. God, my friends, is with the poor, and God is with us if we are with them.

This is not a burden, this is an adventure. Don't let anyone tell you it cannot be done. We can be the generation that ends extreme poverty.

If you need any more inspiration after that, watch the U2 tribute by The Roots from the same show and turn it way up!

Own your words

So much anger and hatred has been brought to the surface this week online, and the story is likely to grow as the media grabs hold of something they've wanted to write for a long time. As blogging has continued to grow and thrive and be adopted by prominent people and organizations, the stories about it being an outlet for irrelevant writing by people with way too much time on their hands (i.e. irrelevant people) have grown increasingly absurd. Unfortunately, they now have a new angle that they know how to use more effectively than any other: fear.

Of course, we've brought this on ourselves. We let the party get out of hand, we ignored what was going on in the basement, and now the cops have been called, the sun is coming up, and our gut says that something went wrong.

My view isn't that more should be done to control those (thankfully) few who have a desperate desire to let out the darkness that's inside them, even if it's with a smirk. As I said before, they will always find an outlet and if their words don't violate the law they have a right to publish them.

Our job is to make it clear that such behavior isn't allowed on our own, virtual property. We must take responsibility for the place we call home. Imagine if someone stuck a yard sign filled with hateful or racist words in my front lawn and I said, "Well, they have a right to say what they want."

If I leave those words in my lawn, I take responsibility for them, and eventually, they belong to me.

Defining Blogging Down

Today is a very sad day. One of the best writers and nicest people in the blogosphere, Kathy Sierra, has been attacked and threatened online to the extent that she has canceled all of her upcoming speaking engagements and her blog will remain silent for the foreseeable future. I had the pleasure of meeting Kathy at SXSW last year and she was incredibly kind to contribute an essay to The Blogging Church. She writes the most consistently interesting and helpful blog out there: Creating Passionate Users.

Kathy shares horrific details of what has been posted about her recently, including death threats that are being investigated by the police. I would hesitate to read it if for no other reason than to keep such hatred and verbal violence from spreading further into our minds and souls. Kathy has suffered immensely and largely alone during the past weeks.

No one should be silenced by bullies, especially someone like Kathy, who has so much of value to say. In this case, the behavior is criminal, but isn't it the case that we have grown increasingly tolerant of cowards who use every forum possible to attack, debase and incite?  I've seen discussions, debates and entire sites shut down by a few determined, anonymous people filled with hate for anyone who is different or disagrees. And those of us who have been able to watch these attacks from the safety of our obscurity secretly wonder if we may one day be a target.

At some point, it has to be enough. There has to be a moment when anonymous cowards espousing hatred and bile are shunned, ignored, blocked, and no longer tolerated. They will always find outlets for their anger and arrogance, but there's no reason for them to be in our online homes and neighborhoods.

Scoble has a terrific post on this subject. He's taking the rest of the week off out of respect for Kathy and simply to digest what the online world has become. I think it's a good idea. In fact, I think the blogosphere as a whole should choose a day and go silent to show our solidarity and to make a commitment to turn the page, raise the bar, and set a new standard for civil conversation.

My heart goes out to Kathy and her daughter, and I pray that she will be protected, healed, and somehow renewed through this awful experience.

Highrise is here

37signals launched Highrise earlier this week. True to form, it's an impressive debut. This is a seriously talented group of people. As we all know, most web apps launch as early betas and are consistently inconsistent and unstable for months. 37signals doesn't get trapped by hype or artificial deadlines - they launch a product when it's solid and ready to be used from day one.

Highrise is a whole new way of making customers and contacts, whether by yourself, with your team, or throughout your organization. You can track every interaction with an individual or company on one page, including utterly simple email integration. You can also create tasks, associate them with a client, assign them to others, and classify them by type, such as email or phone call. Highrise is designed from the ground-up to eliminate the communication silos and dead ends found in nearly every church, organization, and company.

The launch has been a great success and they've already improved the product based on feedback. It's easy to give Highrise a try with a free account. I've used it for the past two days and found it to be a completely stress free experience - everything is right where you'd expect to be, helpful instructions and tips are always nearby, and you never find yourself confused or frustrated. In other words, it just works. It gets out of your way so you can focused on using your talents instead of using the software.

Whether or not you're interested in the software, take a look at the product tour, examples, and help pages. The care and effort put into these pages blows me away. The marketing reads like help and the help reads like a friendly conversation. You'll notice in the FAQs that the answer is often no, but the answer is kind, respectful, and educates you on why no is a good thing is this case.

A rave like this wouldn't be complete without a groan-inducing, pun-filled marketing blurb, so here it is: Highrise will take your organization to the next level!

Leave It Behind

One of the many wonderful presents I received at Christmas was the book, U2 By U2, a history of the band in their own words. I have to say that the photos and stories about each song, album and tour are completely fascinating. In one of my favorite sections, Bono tells the story of Walk On from All That You Can't Leave Behind. If you've ever been curious where the name of this blog comes from and what it means, look no further...

It's a song about nobility and personal sacrifice, about doing what's right, even if your heart is telling you otherwise. The spoken intro gave us the title for our new album: And love is not the easy thing / The only baggage that you can bring / Is all that you can't leave behind. Love, in the highest sense of the word, is the only thing that you can always take with you, in your heart. At some point you are going to have to lose everything else anyway.

There's a passage in Corinthians that uses the image of a house going through a fire, and it seems to suggest that when, in death, we eventually face judgment, all that is made of straw and wood will be burned away, only the eternal things will survive. For me, those things are family and friendship, abstract things, they're not the things that you make. So at the end of the song, there is a litany of ambitions and achievements. You've got to leave it behind / All that you fashion / All that you make / All that you build / All that you break / All that you measure / All that you steal / All this you can leave behind... It is a mantra, really, a bonfire of the vanities, and you can throw anything you want on the fire.

Whatever it is that you want more than love, it has to go. That's a really interesting question to ask: What are the things you want more than love?

That was the inspiration for this site 801 posts ago. Like all good things, though, it can become just one more thing, built of straw and wood, that draws me away from the eternal rather than closer. That's the question I'm asking myself as I approach the third year anniversary of Leave It Behind on April 1.

The One Things That Weren't

As many of you know, the final chapter of the book features advice from 16 very different bloggers. I've received a lot of positive feedback on that chapter, particularly because of the diverse and decidedly super-cool people who participated (see the full list). I think the other reason is that it shows the incredible variety of perspectives on blogging and gives people permission to experiment since there really isn't just one way to blog.

Putting together a chapter like that is fun because you get to seek out interesting people, somewhat like dreaming up my ideal dinner party. I was amazed at some of the people who agreed to participate, which proves that it's always worth asking. There were a few other people from outside the church world I asked, many of the stupendously unlikely category, and I thought it would be fun to share them...

• Jason Fried (37signals)
• Peggy Noonan
• Malcolm Gladwell
• Steve Rubel
• Hugh Mcleod
• David Frum
• Mark Cuban
• David Sifry (Technorati)
• Andrew Sullivan
• Hugh Hewitt

Again, I had no expectation that these would be possible (especially at about 22 degrees of separation), but I did receive some kind replies.

The real question is, who do you wish had been part of The One Thing? What blogger (Christian or otherwise) would you have loved to have heard from?

Grateful Dead Shows

I first discovered the Grateful Dead in my senior year of high school. By college, I was an obsessive listener, especially once I found a fun store at Michigan State that had a huge library of concert tapes that anyone could borrow (yes, they were tapes, not CDs or MP3s).

It wasn't until my senior year, though, that I finally attended my first concert. I followed the incessant rumors of ticket sales and tour dates through rec.music.gdead, a newsgroup that was my first real exposure to the Internet. Over the next two years, I saw 5 concerts altogether, three with Lori. These were some of my favorite experiences - there really isn't much to compare them to. I think the creativity and originality of the music was what captivated me. No show was like another and each song was different from the last time it was played. The community was also incredibly kind and friendly, even to someone like me who was so unlike the typical Deadhead.

The music is still one of my favorite things to listen to simply because it's so timeless. Thanks to one of the original Internet archive projects, I can listen to these shows or any others online. Here's my list:

3/23/92 The Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan
3/24/92 The Palace
3/11/93 Rosemont Horizon in Chicago, Illinois
7/31/94 The Palace
8/01/94 The Palace

If you want to sample one my favorite shows, this Halloween performance from 1991 is outstanding. I'm so glad I was able to be part of that experience before it came to an end, no matter how old it makes me sound when I'm describing it to Ben!

New blog

Terry Storch has launched his new blog > visit TerryStorch.com.

A few political links

Slow Train Coming: Economist article on John McCain

The Note: Great source for political news

The Politico: The latest about the presidential campaign

He's Back: WSJ profile of Newt Gingrich's possible presidential run

TypePad Books Interview

The interview for the TypePad Books Podcast is now online. Harold did a great job editing our lengthy conversation into a much more accessible 20 minutes that still touches on a lot of different topics. Download the MP3 here.

And while you're there, subscribe to the podcast which features a lot of great interviews with authors smarter and more interesting than me!