I helped start something utterly, utterly bizarre.

Alyson and I sent ten bouquets of lovely flowers to Jack Thompson,
coinciding with a seven-page, thinktank-assembled letter, along with
ten pages of signatures of the supporters who made it possible.

It was one hell of a week.

We had a strange message to it; the notion that we gamers are normal human
beings with senses of both humor and decency. Honesty and simplicity, with
that message in mind, went into making that letter.

We pulled together support, we gathered donations, we sent a hell of a lot
of flowers.

Those flowers arrived with that letter on Tuesday, February 7th. Within a
few hours Jack Thompson had made a public announcement on GamePolitics.
According to him, Take Two Interactive instigated a conspiratorial
campaign to send him flowers as harassment, and he was sending them back
to Take Two as a reminder of the 'blood on their hands.' Our letter was
confirmed as delivered by UPS, yet he has not spoken of it once.

Smooth, Jack. Very smooth.

Honestly, a reasonable reply was never expected. I personally expected
something at least coherent... but I was apparently more optimistic
than anybody else. This was a shock and yet not a surprise. That a man
like this would behave so two-dimensionally, so dishonestly... I was wrong
to have put it past him.

...but it didn't matter. By the time that he even received all those pretty
flowers, it didn't matter at all.

Jack Thompson is losing significance to our community just as quickly as he
is losing the title 'human' in the back on my mind. That seems a bit
hypocritical coming from me, but hear me out. Jack IS two-dimensional,
maybe even less than that. Communication with him is ultimately impossible
but fortunately futile. As much as I want to see him thrown from the media
for the hateful bigot he is, I've usually been the first to remind
people that he's just the screaming figurehead for a culture of hateful
bigots just like him.

Yes, there's a whole society of out-of-touch xenophobes who make our
generation the anathema-du-jour. That's an issue. That's almost the
BIGGEST issue.

But that's not why he doesn't matter. He didn't matter when the flowers
arrived. He didn't matter when we ordered them a week before that. He was
ultimately meaningless less than a week after the project started, and it
was plain to see.

In four days, we had to end our drive early, short of our original one-week
intent. We ended early because we had surpassed our starting donation goals
tenfold, and our letter signatures TWENTY times over. We had letters from
people from all walks of life asking us, sometimes pleading simply to
be involved with what we were doing. Network administrators told us they
were proud of us. Tax consultants said they wish they had thought of it
themselves. Law students said they were honored to sign it.

The 'f u jack thomspon lols' and 'u should send him a bomb lol' comments
were few and far between... in fact, we may have had just the two. This
project, a scheme to confront Jack Thompson with the innately gamer
combination of intelligence and silliness, brought out the very best in the
community. The strongest-willed, best-spoken gamers we had ever seen were
coming out to say "People like us are the majority, and its time we were
represented."

I always thought it was true... but I never realized how true it
really was, apparently.

Hundreds, hundreds of gamers from around the world had the same thing
to say. "We believe in this message. We demand respect. We don't want
idiots with prank calls being the standard by which we are judged."

My friends, that matters. Jack Thompson does not. One psychotic man
pales in comparison to the growing potential of a 'sub'culture that is
binding modern society together. Our goal was to coax coherency out of Jack
Thompson and instead we may have coaxed a giant out of its sleep. The gamer
community has its hand in every city, every port, every business and every
sport. Servers supported by gamers let Jack Thompson send his threatening
emails to webmasters and district attorneys. Gamers running networks day
and night make it possible for Jack Thompson to insult Dennis McCauley with
the frequency that he does.

Those of the 'condemned generation' that he calls 'pixelantes' make up every
pillar of this modern, digital world. The gamer community has all this
power, yet exercises none... because it is not a gamer nation. We
lack the organization to focus that power, despite having the collective
willpower to fuel it. All we need is a cause we can respect and a message
we can put our faith in, and a 'nation' could find its leaders.

What Flowers For Jack created was a microcosm of the real needs of the
gaming community. Intelligent, motivated, and angry gamers can pull
together in record time and with amazing dedication if they find a cause the
treats them for who they are.

What they are is the majority.

That, friends, is what we learned. We've all been aware of the problem, we
all hate being demonized as the 'damn kids' of this era, but we've been
looking at it backwards. We've been quiet, we've been opressed, we've been
victims. We are none of these things.

Gamers are everywhere. Gamers are constantly interconnected
worldwide because the interests they share are so universal. Gamers
live, work, and play in the middle of the technology that is driving the
whole world forward.

Gamers are a source of incredible influence and power just waiting to
be harnessed.

It's not about toppling down people like Jack Thompson.

It never was.

It's about pulling ourselves up above all of them.

...where we belong.