Bloggence Birthday
This blog began a year ago, round about today, so an anniversary reflection seems like the right thing to do today.This began as a felt need to communicate differently with my friends and family about my take on the world, how it affects me and how I affect it. I was struck last year about how little anyone really knows about how their own personal ideas are tangled up with the false images we are shown by a system that frustrates us. Half of what we say is factually wrong, and the other half is ethically challenged. We live within an enormous echo chamber of received ideas that effectively shuts out most of what actually happens, what has happened historically, and by cause and effect, what will happen tomorrow. Meanwhile, we are sleepwalking into an abyss.
As it turned out, this past year of blogging was not successful in penetrating the din of that echo chamber, predictably so. Yet a surprise was that particular things I wrote were linked to by people I haven't met, and a small handful of (former) strangers even wrote email to me. I added a site meter that counts visits here. The results show that this blog now serves mainly as an archive. Since I posted virtually every day, there are now about 350 items. Visitors tend to stumble on those through Google mainly, and through a number of links from other bloggers. In the interest of openness, below is a graph of visits and page views from this past month:
The total number of visits so far = 5,727. Page views is twice that. Average Per Day = 35. A modest blog.
The blogging turned out to help me keep track of some things. I'm sure that to some it seems bewilderingly eclectic, while on the contrary to others it seems always the same routinely leftist view. These two impressions are of course intimately connected. What would need explaining, instead, is why the bloggence didn't take up so many other vital issues, and why the view on these is insufficiently radical.
After today, bloggence will be updated less consistently. I will be going into exile from my exile for the next two weeks, lying lower than the low I've already reached. After that another busy season begins, and this blog may move slightly away from baring the open secrets of current events toward more theoretical issues. I always feel a slight yet definite uplift of the spirit right after I post a blog here, and thus I will try to continue into a second year.
posted by E. Heroux @ 7:27 PM
2 Comments:
Erick, Happy Birthday!! ;)
Though I haven't checked in here too frequently, I usually go back a week or two in posts. I have learned much about you I would not have suspected and, not surprisingly, I agreed with or identified with many of your thoughts on various issues. Often a post (usually political, sometimes social or environmental) led me to another site, newsletter, or blog. Always intriguing, often enlightening. Time and a lack of confidence in my ablity to formulate an intellectual response prevented me from posting comments. Indeed the vacuum of the "enormous echo chamber" seems to suck out any intelligent response and the void is filled with the busy-ness and distraction of modern life. Other times I have felt overwhelmed at the enormity of certain issues compared to my capabilities and responsibilities to my family. I always think "the apostles dropped everything, left their livestock, their boats, and their families to follow Jesus. Is that what I'm supposed to do? There is no single issue great enough to me that outweighs the purpose of my life right now as a wife and mother. I do my best to instill my beliefs and values pertaining to those issues; political, ethical, social, environmental,etc...in my son and husband both by word and example. Sometimes I think "why don't more people care(more)? Why aren't people rioting? not a handful, nor hundreds or a thousand or two, but millions?
I have passed on your blog to a few people who may have only been minimally piqued. If some pass it on to a few more and so on, who knows? You provide information not covered in American popular media and sources not readily available. Please keep it up! From one torch, many can be lit, casting light on serious matters and, one can hope, sparking mankind's will to create change.
Happy Blog birthday Erick. I am grateful for your Bloggence!
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