I find reading blogs about blogging particulaly uninteresting. But the comments on something Tom Shugart posted (and he doesn’t often write about blogging anyway) gave me significant and thoughtful pause — mostly Dave Rogers’ comment that “What draws me to blogs is not the topic of the blog, but the revelation of the blogger.”
And maybe having a conference of webloggers to talk about blogging might be as boring as blogging about blogging. I’ve registered for the BloggerCon at Harvard in October, but I’m having second thoughts — for the afore mentioned reason as well as for the exorbitant registration cost. (They offer a student rate, but not a Senior Citizen rate.) I want to go so that I can come back and do a post entitled “The oldest living continuously posting female blogger tells all” and give an outsider’s perspective on all of those “A” list bloggers who will probably be there. I think it would be a hoot. A very pricey hoot, however, and one I’m not sure I can afford.
I am sure that I don’t want to blog so much about politics, although it’s hard for me NOT to write about politics, since today’s devious politics really irk me. But what I want to remember to do is write about me in relation to those politics rather than just recap something I read somewhere else.
Having said that, I’m now going to post something political — although I didn’t write it, myrln did. But they’re my sentiments as well…
Okay, we will again survive. I am struck by the uncommon goodness evoked by the outage: technology goes out, humanity comes in. Sounds like a correlation to me. In NYC people sleep on the sidewalks because they can’t stay in their hotels, and nobody bothers or assaults or robs them. Civilians stand in intersections and direct traffic to maintain a semblance of order and sanity. Subway-trapped riders evacuate the tunnels without panic, their way often lit by cigarette lighters held up as if at a rock concert (and despite Bloomberg’s smoking ban). People help the elderly and kids. A liver transplant interrupted by the outage is finished in some dim light and weak power. Somebody gives free sneakers to people without good walking shoes having to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. Somebody else gives free ice cream (unlike the gouging vendors who took advantage).
Obviously, there is untapped, unasked-for, and unseen good in people. Our culture suppresses it in favor of greed and egocentrism. It does nothing to evoke that hidden wonder because if it did, here’s what we would learn: we don’t need overweening government or a political power structure, we don’t need oppressive big business, we don’t need mind-numbing consumerism. Why not? Because we would have community. People caring about each other for no other reason than we have our humanity in common. I wonder what it would be like to live in such a culture? What would a culture and government that encouraged and supported such humanity achieve? It would be a whole different world, to be sure, one we can’t/don’t imagine because there’s no room in our 24/7 world to do so.
Instead, we are saddled with a power structure (non-electric) that urges people to conserve power in this crisis, to forego air-conditioning if not essential, to keep lights out — while at the same time we see the t.v. pictures (from fully-lit, fully-monitored studios) of Times Square with all its neon ablaze, selling our souls while people’s bodies swelter and struggle just to stay alive. Or to get home.
I love people as people. I despise power (non-electric) structures because to exist, they must strip people of their humanity. We need a new Revolution. And not one of Dumbya’s kind. Reach Out is what I would call it. “Think of every day as a crisis for the guy next to you,” is what it would espouse.
Yeah.