…and still unrepentant! :-)
I lost touch with the blogosphere during a holiday vacation week away from frequent Internet access, and have yet to catch up on reading my favorite blogs, much less posting here. (The accumulation of interesting stuff to read really does become a daunting virtual “pile” in short order!) But I do hope to pick this up and get the momentum going again before too long… Until I make the time to start writing substantive posts, I may slip into “linkblogging” and short-post mode for a little while…
Among other happy discoveries, I’ve been greatly enjoying the recently launched “Glenn and Helen Show” podcast, put together by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds and his wife Dr. Helen. I’ve been a big fan of Glenn’s widely read (to say the least) blog, and he brings the same refreshingly level-headed and inquisitive approach to the podcasts that comes through in his prolific posting. The interesting topics and interviewees have been plentiful. Don’t miss the lastest episode: another conferene-call interview with the ever-engaging, thought-provoking informative and irreverent Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan. Available (free) via the iTunes Music Store,
Yahoo, and wherever fine podcasts are aggregated…! Listen and enjoy!
To any few readers I have who might be stopping by periodically to check for updates here: I thank you sincerely for your too-kind interest, and I apologize. I’ve been itching to write more, and have a few almost-finished drafts that have been circling in a holding pattern for far too long, but I haven’t yet managed to figure out how to fit this project in as a regular part of my life and land them. It is quite simply beyond my miniscule intellect’s comprehension to understand how blogopheric giants like Glenn Reynolds manage to succeed in their full-time day jobs, have time for family, and simultaneously write (or even “link-blog” with brief, insightful comments) so prolifically. My work life isn’t even at its most intensely demanding right now, so I would think I should be able to fit an allowance for writing into my still-existent free time now if ever. No doubt part of the problem is that I’m just plain slow at this when I do manage to sit down and get to it — a situation that I can only hope will improve as I gain more experience as a writer. In the meantime, to any who may be reading this, thank you for your patience! I hope to soon get the hang of what I’m attempting to do here and manage to produce some worthwhile prose on the burning issues that have motivated me to start this project. I’m going to try to put some time into finishing up one or two new posts today. Hope to see you again soon on the other side!
OK. Today, I begin.
But first, a tip of the hat is in order. (I’m not actually given to wearing hats very often, but let’s just set that minor detail aside for the moment and go with the metaphor, shall we?)
One of the blogs I’ve been frequently reading and enjoying since first encountering it last Spring is written by a trained therapist living in New England. Blogging anonymously under the pseudonym “neo-neocon“, her goal has in part been to explore the process of her own political change in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, in an ongoing series titled “A Mind is a Difficult Thing to Change“. Reading her insights and perspective, and occasionally participating in the discussions in the comments sections following her posts, has been a very helpful kind of therapy for me, as someone going through a very similar experience earlier in life and on the other side of the continent.
Neo’s thoughtful work has helped motivate me to begin recounting my own story and exploring my own process of change and of coming to better understand myself. I’ve been grateful for the thought and effort she puts into her writing, which consistently comes across as being motivated by a sincere desire to better understand things, and I hope to follow her admirably level-headed example in that regard. (Hers is certainly a blog to which I’d refer any Democrat with a sincere interest in understanding what the heck happened to his or her wayward former compatriots.)
As a practical means of keeping momentum on the writing end (with the added benefit of hopefully not boring my readers too terribly) I expect to try to stick to the essentials and get through this bit of storytelling fairly quickly. There is plenty of stuff in the recent past and present that I want to blog about, and I hope to start making more time for that soon. So if I can manage it, I’m going to do my level best to suppress any perfectionistic tendencies that might become an undue hindrance, and try to treat this more like writing a series of e-mail messages — which, for whatever reason, don’t seem to take as long to compose. Better to post something rather than to wait indefinitely for the right turn of phrase to come to mind, or to be sure that every last detail is in place.
The above said, I do feel the need to start this blog by establishing some basic context: Who am I, and what’s motivated me to begin this project? In my most recent post, I wrote:
Discovering that I am more different from those around me than I had realized, in my way of seeing and thinking, has prompted me to try to understand the essential reasons for and origins of those differences. Is there just a different set of axioms wired into my way of perceiving, analyzing, and responding to the world? How did I acquire them? What makes me “me”?
As I get underway, these are the some of the questions I’ll be setting out to explore.
I’ve been told that I have changed over the past several years. Have I in fact changed in my views? Have the Democratic party and “liberalism” with which I once decidedly identified changed? Have I grown to become more aware of and to more clearly understand the foundational differences between my own beliefs and the philosophy of contemporary liberalism in the U.S.? To some extent, each of these things has happened. And while the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath have certainly been a catalyst for my own change and reexamination of my thinking, the story goes back farther than that and there’s much more to it.
My first piece in the series is coming together. If I don’t quite manage to finish it today, I hope to get it posted sometime in the coming week for sure. Stay tuned and thanks for visiting!
Having amply, if unintentionally, demonstrated what I meant by “weeks at a time,” I suppose I can consider it OK to get this project rolling now. I’m working on it, folks. The trouble is, I’ve been accumulating so many ideas I want to write about that figuring out just where and how to begin is turning out to be a big challenge. Combined with the need to make time to sit and write at reasonably regular intervals, the experience is giving me a whole new degree of respect for those who manage to make this look so easy.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to say and the points I want to cover, jotting down thoughts here and there and composing fragments of future posts as they come to me in seemingly random order. I think throughout my life this has just been the way that the process of writing has worked for me. Occasionally, I’ve had the experience of writing something straight through from begining to end without looking back, and being reasonably satisfied with the end result. More often, though, I’ll start at some random point in the middle (wherever my mind seems inclined to focus first) and build the thing up, adding fragments as they come to mind, and finally arranging them in sequence and linking them together until I have a coherent end result with a natural flow of thought to it.
At this stage the pieces are starting to come together, but not necessarily in sequential order, so it’s going to take a bit more time before I can start to roll the first finished pieces off the assembly line. I assure you though, my mind is still on this, and I’m working on it when I can.
It’s been an interesting exercise thinking back to earlier parts of my life and revisiting the path by which I became the person I am today, while attempting to distill from that the set of experiences that seem to have been most important in shaping the way I see and think. Discovering that I am more different from those around me than I had realized, in my way of seeing and thinking, has prompted me to try to understand the essential reasons for and origins of those differences. Is there just a different set of axioms wired into my way of perceiving, analyzing, and responding to the world? How did I acquire them? What makes me “me”?
As I get underway, these are the some of the questions I’ll be setting out to explore. Stay tuned. I hope to have more in the coming weeks.
A few things that I didn’t manage to work into my first post:
I expect that my frequency-of-posting style in this blog will be to take whatever time I need to carefully consider and try to clearly articulate each set of ideas that I set out to cover, and therefore to post less frequently than many other bloggers do. (Which is not to imply that other bloggers don’t think things through; I just suspect it will take me longer to approach such quality of work as I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying from others!) So if I end up being quiet for weeks at a time, don’t despair or assume that I’ve given up. I’ll make it clear when I consider this project finished, if that ever happens.
I’m writing under a pseudonym here to keep work and personal life separate, both for my own benefit and to protect my employer. It just seems like the smart thing to do these days, given how easy it is to Google up information and connect it to its source, and given how politically homogeneous the circles in which I currently work and socialize appear to be.
Irrespective of the free license to rant unaccountably that blogging anonymously provides, my intent is to try to keep the discussion here reasonable and say nothing that I wouldn’t be willing to stand by. If I’m not sure about something, I’ll say I’m not sure. I may at times feel the need to vent a bit when something really bothers me, but I’ll make my best effort to take a good deep breath before doing so. Likewise, when I recommend or refer to other blogs, I’ll try to stick to sites where reasoned discussion is the norm. I don’t get much out of reading angry one-sided screeds, and it’s not my style either.
Lastly, I hope it will become clear as I go on that, while I’m writing based on my own experience living in the United States, and feel a desire to express my love for the particular country and culture that have made my own life of freedom possible, I do not regard the love of freedom or the ability to adopt and live by its principles as being the exclusive purview of any particular nation or group of people. It is a universal concept to me, there for any who choose to strive for it. A high regard for the importance of freedom has certainly been a foundational and defining characteristic of American culture and governance, but of course we are a nation built by and of people from all over the globe, my own ancestors included among them. So to you, from wherever you may hail, if you feel this love of, this hunger for liberty too, then welcome, friend. I hope you will find comfort, inspiration, or something of value to you in these pages.
Hang in there folks. There’s more coming, I promise.
This is the beginning of an attempt to give something back to a country to which I feel I owe my life, and to a culture of freedom with which I am deeply in love. It is my long overdue thank-you letter to America. It is the still-unfolding story — told from inside this wonderful, imperfect bubble of relative freedom, stability and prosperity that I feel so deeply grateful to inhabit — of my own American Dream.
That last in particular is a rather loaded phrase to use these days, I have come to learn, but I leave it there with a purpose. It’s the tragically baggage-laden name given to one of many concepts I intend to touch on here. Give me time and I will explain what it means to me, and why I think it is worthy of more than our derision.
Part of my approach to this project, I expect, will be telling fragments of the one story that I know best: the story that I have lived and seen with my own eyes. So it seems appropriate to begin with one such fragment, one thread drawn from the many that have run through my life:
Music has always been precious to me. The music I’ve known in my life has become an inextricable part of the way I remember times and places gone by, and of the way I think about the future. “Fearless Dream” is a phrase taken, in a sense, from a song I grew up with. During a pivotal phase in my life, between my friends’ departures for college and embarking on my own adventures — now, I dare admit, roughly 15 years ago — one of the albums I listened to most was Rush’s “Exit … Stage Left”. It was frequently there in the background as I dreamt my own dreams and hatched my own hopeful and ambitious plans for the future. The second song on the album, “Red Barchetta,” tells the story of a young man’s weekend escapes to his uncle’s farm, where he takes an old roadster for harrowing white-knuckle rides down winding country roads. Geddy Lee’s infamous soprano voice soars exuberantly over Neil Peart’s equally famous rock-steady syncopated drumming, as guitar and bass drive the rhythm line home in tight and agile unison:
“Jump to the ground
As the turbo slows to cross the borderline.
Run like the wind of excitement
chilling up and down my spine.
For down in his barn,
my uncle preserved for me an old machine
(old in your years).
To keep it as new has been his fearless dream.
I strip away the old debris, that hides the shining car
a brilliant, red Barchetta from a better-managed time”
Or at least, that’s how I always heard it. The consensus among the lyrics websites seems to be that the actual phrase is “dearest dream.” Some of the other details differ from what I remember too. But the above has stuck in my mind as what my ears always heard, and seems fitting in its own right — so, for my purposes, “fearless dream” it will always be. When I listen to the song today, those ringing words still lift my spirits as much as ever.
The phrase struck me as an appropriate title for this web log for two reasons. First — and this is a broad theme on which I hope to elaborate here — because I think it takes courage to live in a truly free society. Freedom comes with no roadmap and no warranty. Trying to figure out what to do with it can be scary as hell. It has been, at times, for me. This is something that I think most of us are not taught to expect, at least not directly. Yet acknowledging the inherent risk that goes in hand with having real freedom, and addressing the question of why living in freedom might be worth embracing the accompanying uncertainty and peril, is essential I think, if we’re to have some hope of preserving this precious and hard-won gift. We must keep the answer to this key question in mind as we consider possible courses of action that can curtail freedom, or we may give it up without much of a thought.
Second, I want to make some humbly offered contribution here to illuminating and thereby hopefully helping to revitalize and preserve the ideas that have made this culture of freedom possible — ideas that I think form the essential cornerstone of our culture’s success. Ideas of great prescience and beauty that we seem, from my current perspective, to be in actual danger of either forgetting or intentionally discarding. “…this brilliant, red Barchetta from a better-managed time…”
I don’t think of myself as someone who’s given to worrying overly much. If anything, I more often tend to fall into the middle-of-the-road “Crisis? What crisis?” category. But certain of the seemingly popular attitudes that I have encountered repeatedly since my college years have left me with the sinking feeling that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong in our perception of ourselves and our way of life. We seem to be paying an inordinate amount of attention to the hand-wringing of professional social critics, while forgetting the very good reasons for choosing to live as we do. At times, I fear we might be getting ready to throw this precious gift, born of so much sacrifice, out the window. Certainly I know people, including old and dear friends, who seem to think that the time for the American way of life, with its emphasis on individual freedom and carefully circumscribed governance, has come and gone. That we ought to replace the maxim of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and the legal and governmental framework that supports it, with something ostensibly better. If that is to be the case, then I feel the need to say my peace before it is gone. Because if we turn our backs on this idea of freedom that has been so foundational to our way of life, I think we should at least take the time to fully understand what it is that we will be giving up.
Writing this weblog is part of my way of dealing with the heartbreak of this apparent change in attitudes, attempting to understand what has caused it, and trying to figure out whether it might be reversible. Freedom has made my life possible, and it has taken me some years to appreciate just how precious and fragile it is, and to realize just how much I have taken it for granted.
There are so many interrelated ideas that I want to explore here, that it’s difficult to say at the outset what the overarching, unifying theme will be. This has to do with how we think about economics, equality, responsibility, rights, science, reason, technology, art, culture, human achievement, history, and the future … that great unknown and unknowable. I can’t possibly forsee, at the outset of this project, whether I will be able to clearly articulate the many interconnections among ideas that I’m setting out to explore … or whether I will even succeed in making the time, amid a very busy work and home life, to keep up the project. But these are things I find myself thinking about all the time, and touch on issues that I’ve come to think are crucial to our future. This stuff has been lodged painfully in my heart and I just have to get it out. So I will try.
I of course have my own filter, my own lens through which I see the world, which may well differ from yours. I have great confidence in the “free market in ideas” — in your capacity as the reader to survey the wide variety of ideas that are out there and then draw your own conclusions based on the sum of the evidence and arguments presented. Critics have every right to criticize, and we have the right to ask whether what they’re saying really makes sense. My aim here is only to use my one voice to say things that I think need saying. There are well-reasoned arguments to be made in favor of choosing freedom over safety and other competing demands, and I hope to shed some light on those here, for it seems we don’t get much exposure to them nowadays.
In no small part, I am here to make what, much to my surprise, has become a pretty bold and audacious statement in the year 2005: that we in the United States have been needlessly losing confidence in our way of life. That we have a culture that, while it needs a little help here and there, is every bit worthy of our hope, enthusiasm, adoration, sacrifice, courage, loyalty, and devotion.
This is the beginning of an attempt to give something back to a country to which I feel I owe my life, and to a culture of freedom with which I am deeply in love. It is my long overdue thank-you letter to America. It is the still-unfolding story of my own American Dream.
Stay tuned. The best, I hope and believe, is yet to come.
