Activism is Sacrifice

To be an activist, you actually have to act.
Today in class, we read an argument by Malcom Gladwell that discussed modern activism. Or more accurately, the complete lack of it. In today's age, there is a kind of communication that has been unseen before now. Twitter causes, like #istandwithkesha, #istandwithahmed, and the likes. Some would say that online activism is the new means of making change.
However, I have to disagree. While I think that online activism can help causes by spreading information, that's all it really does. Though this is important, this is just spreading information-this is not activism.
In a country like America, where we have the right to free speech, tweeting a post, sharing emails, or liking posts helps alert people to problems in the world. But how much change is actually being made? People aren't actually changing the situation. It's important to let people know the problems going on in the world, but what's the point of talking about a problem if nothing is done to solve it? For example, everyone knows how disturbing the dictatorship of North Korea is. But what's being done to fix the situation? Nothing. For all of our American resources, we simply lack the privilege to call ourselves "activists".
Our minimal efforts of activism are often problematic. Like Gladwell said in his article, American activists often lack the ability to spread accurate information. "The cadre of prominent bloggers...misunderstood the situation." It seems like we can't even spread information correctly.
American activists are full of privilege. Though everyone is needed to cause change, those who are not directly affected by the problems of society should have less impact on activism. (A white male's opinion should not be equal to a black woman's on racism and sexism.) Truth is, while there are still huge problems in our society like racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, etc, we often do not face problems like other countries, where people are killed for voicing their opinion. That does not mean our problems aren't important, but Americans seem to ignore issues at home to basically ignore problems in other parts of the world. When people do speak out for important causes like Black Lives Matter, the activists are seen as radical and dramatic.
For a society that claims to love activism, we do a pretty bad job of fixing today's modern problems.