Why Am I Telling You All This?

by Rich Miles

There's a point to all this. The point is that there is almost always a larger point underpinning the news you see every day - or sometimes a smaller point hidden in the weeds of our leaders' rhetoric. I try to establish and expand on these whenever possible. I'm not the only blogger doing this sort of thing, in fact my blog links will connect you to folks who may do it a lot better than I do. But I promise this - no one does it just like you'll see it done here.

And as time goes on, you will I hope see some of my friends and colleagues, and perhaps even you on this blog. Because while I am the lead voice here, I don't even want to be the only one. There are a lot of people who feel their voices aren't heard in the world today. If I can let a few of them speak here on my little corner of the Web, I will do so happily and proudly.

Because we live in a time when, to a greater degree than at any time in America's history, our alleged leaders bank on our not paying very close attention to what they do, and when on rare occasions we call them on their lies, they behave as if it's our fault for being foolish enough to let ourselves be lied to.

Or they tell us that what we see and hear is not reality, that we didn't really hear them tell us one thing and do another, or tell us one thing today and another two weeks later, or any number of other ways our leaders have of treating us like abused spouses who are so addled from the repeated blows that we don't know reality from fiction.

And we keep letting them do it to us - keep letting our leaders lie to us, in fact often seem to INSIST that they lie to us so we needn't face the painful truths, and only once in a while do we get brave enough to say, ya know, that doesn't quite seem true - right before they slap us down again, and tell us that black is white, and up is down.

A lot of people think I'm too old to be this earnest (I'm in my mid-fifties). A lot of them think I should have figured out by this point in life that no one person can really make any difference in what goes on in our country. And I suppose that's true. But I'm not just one person - as you know if you're a frequent web-crawler, there are an awful lot of us out here, and together, maybe we can make some kind of difference, change one mind, debunk one lie, something.

So I and the zillion other bloggers all over the U.S. who take an interest in matters political and social will try to bring some light to the dark experience that is being a liberal and/or progressive in America these days. We'll keep talking till someone listens, I guess.

Rich Miles
April 30, 2006