Edward Snowden called into a panel at South by Southwest today. He was somewhere in Russia, still on the lam from a United States government that views him as a traitor and wants him imprisoned for it, and he was answering questions from the public, on camera, for the first time.

Before this, he was a packet of information lopped on a table. He was access to all of the NSA's misdeeds and little else. He was part of the package deal.

Instead, today, Snowden spoke cogently and urgently about action. Not for himself, by the way. He did not speak to clear his name. He pleaded for more advances in the tech community to help Americans ensure that any future economy — any Technological Revolution — is entirely their own.

"There's a political response that needs to occur, but there's also a tech response that needs to occur. The people in the room in Austin, they're the folks who can fix this," he said. "We need public oversight, some way for trusted public figures to advocate for us. We need a watchdog that watches Congress, because if we're not informed, we can't consent to these policies."

It was a call to action, but this was different. This was not a politician promising vague, intangible change in an effort to win influence. There was no hand waving, no music, no parade.

Instead, Edward Snowden is the best kind of American leader: A man, in the face of immense harm, pursuing a concrete idea that will better every person, check unchecked power, and allow us more access to what we know about ourselves.

There are two movements clashing here. One of the movements is dying.

The people in one of them are dying, and not at the hands of the tyranny they dream up around them, but of sad, slow, typical death. There are no cathartic last stands on the front lawn, a man and his hunting rifle getting in a last hurrah against an ATF coming for the gun rack. There is no last-second poetry penned while withering away because the socialist gruel rations finally ran out. People are dying of the regular ol' stuff, afraid.

The other movement is adapting to the world around them. They are accepting the beauty in information and one another, instead of fearing for the sake of fear. They are on the offensive.

In Washington D.C., Sarah Palin delivered the keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday.

She literally read a children's book to adults to raucous applause. It was a modified Dr. Seuss book that she got from an email chain letter.

In that other movement, there are meetings like the one today at SXSW. They talked about the complexities of data collection — and how to synthesize it, transparently, for good. It was about exposing data collection programs to scrutiny — to uncover abuse — so it can only be used for people, not against them. It was about, as Snowden said today, "how do you interpret (these communications), how do you understand them."

All this tech talk is, invariably, filled with compassion.

It's no longer a question of if we will or will not have a better America. It's a question of how long it will take the younger and brighter and better to drown out the institution that is impeding American progress with grade school debate, bullying and pettiness. It's a question of when they will be able to communicate to America that they are the only chance at a productive future.

Those communicators are just starting to surface now. Bill Nye is viewed as a cult hero because we allowed him into our classrooms with VHS tapes, then he refined and strengthened and sharpened his message as we refined and strengthened and sharpened along with him. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, one of the world's first pop-astrophysicists, debuted a show last night solely about how our world was created. That show was the third-highest rated show on television last night.

We are ready to have fun with learning — to not shun more information, but to accept and revel in it. We are ready for that to be considered the best part of the American identity again.

We just need more leaders.

Edward Snowden proved today that he's capable of being one of them.

The fear-based America is, at points, onto something: There will still be large swaths of those content to do nothing, those hangers-on, those clinging to the bootstraps that we've previously pulled up. This was brought up consistently this weekend, specifically by potential future presidential candidate Paul Ryan, who wants school lunches taken away from children whose potentially fictitious parents, he believes, do not work hard enough.

Demonizing those people for the last few decades has done nothing. Punishing them has only done harm. We have to drag them, instead, kicking and screaming, into an open educational revolution, where data and science help us become better, more compassionate adults.

We have to make a decision soon: Do we want the dying America, a Crab Mentality America — the one that promotes life as a series of minor battles to prove each individual's worth against one another?

Or do we want the America that works together, instead, by sharing open information so we can live longer and more valuable lives?

There is no children's book for it. The facility of Kindergarten analogies may have to be left behind in order to know more and do great things. We will have to challenge ourselves to view newer kinds of leaders — ones that were once bullied for their smarts, or remanded for breaking a rule that needed to be broken.

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