{"id":2365,"date":"2007-12-04T10:27:18","date_gmt":"2007-12-04T15:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ibiblio.org\/pjones\/wordpress\/?p=2365"},"modified":"2007-12-11T16:23:26","modified_gmt":"2007-12-11T21:23:26","slug":"we-are-the-people-or-is-that-ones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/we-are-the-people-or-is-that-ones\/","title":{"rendered":"We are the People (or is that Ones)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In his Sunday NYTimes column<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/12\/02\/business\/coll02friedman.html\"> &#8220;The People We Have Been Waiting For&#8221;<\/a>, Tom Friedman rejoices in the role of Google and of MIT students in accelerating the work on energy problems and efficiencies. So far so good. Engineers see a problem and work on solutions whilst politicians argue. Each set doing what they are best at ;-> <\/p>\n<p>Friedman is especially intrigued by <a href=\"http:\/\/vds.mit.edu\/\">MIT&#8217;s Vehicle Design Summit<\/a> where the &#8220;Linux of cars&#8221; may be being developed by distributed and social production. What Friedman loves most and what he uses to conclude his column is the VDS tag line <em>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We are the people we have been waiting for.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Friedman doesn&#8217;t quite get the quote right and he doesn&#8217;t credit the author of the phrase <em>&#8220;We are the people we have been waiting for.&#8221;<\/em> She is the late poet June Jordan. The phrase &#8220;we are the ones we have been waiting for&#8221; from <strong>Poem for South African Women (1980)<\/strong> was picked up by many graduation speakers (I may use it myself) and others including most notably the singers <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sweethoney.com\/\">Sweet Honey in the Rock<\/a> who made the phrase into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/musics?lid=Hdzq_1vguGM&#038;aid=_baX13uIRVJ&#038;sid=1OcYaR44CXD&#038;sa=X&#038;oi=music&#038;ct=result\">a song<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mahalo.com\/Alice_Walker\">Alice Walker<\/a> who took the phrase as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/biblio\/9781595581372?&#038;PID=32318\">title for her most recent collection of essays (2006)<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll have to say I was somewhat surprised, yet satisfied, to see June Jordan&#8217;s words taken up by MIT students but surprised and unsatisfied that Friedman missed the travels for the phrase entirely.<\/p>\n<p>More on Jordan who has had a school named for her at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.junejordan.com\/\">her website<\/a> BTW <a href=\"http:\/\/www.junejordan.com\/byjune.html\">the poem is there too.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his Sunday NYTimes column &#8220;The People We Have Been Waiting For&#8221;, Tom Friedman rejoices in the role of Google and of MIT students in accelerating the work on energy problems and efficiencies. So far so good. Engineers see a problem and work on solutions whilst politicians argue. Each set doing what they are best [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}