Thursday, June 21, 2012

June 21: fight

Today I've been part of a fight. It has nothing to do with EDs but is connected with one of my most important hobbies: knitting (and most of the earlier entries on the blog are knitting related).
Last night, it emerged that the US Olympic Committee wrote a 'cease and desist' letter to Casey, the founder of Ravelry, about our wonderful event 'The Ravelympics'. Gawker picked up the story and so did Hot Air (and their coverage of the story enables us to forgive them for characterising all knitters as 'old ladies'). #ravelympics was trending on Twitter. The USOC Facebook page was inundated with comments; their email address was removed from their website after the volume of messages caused their system to crash.
Earlier on, an apology was issued. It was then updated to reflect further outrage that the USOC seemed to think that their 'show of support' for Ravelry would be to ask us to send them knitted items. Raveler "Jinniver" wrote a great post about it on her blog. The latest apology is more acceptable. But no one knows whether Casey and the Ravelry team are going to continue to face further action over the Ravelympics name.

None of this is ED-related. BUT it does show that fighting brings progress - whether we are fighting against the petty brand enforcement of an organisation that's terrified of losing support of its corporate sponsors, or whether our fight is the day-to-day internal struggle to allow ourselves to eat, to rest, to be well.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You bring up a very interesting point - fighting brings progress - I had not looked at it that way before, but you are so right. Sometimes the progress is painful, but it's progress, nonetheless.

Thanks for sharing!