hey. it’s coincidence. (or conspiracy.)

Behold: an article on how the internet has changed communication.

I’m blogging that.

Back in the halcyon days of way-back-when, I had a personal webpage. It had an “updates” page. “Updates,” because blogging wasn’t a word back then. Wikipedia says that the term “weblog” was coined in 1997, which would mean that it came about a couple of years after I made myself a website with Angelfire. The first thing I did with my personal webpage was post a lengthy diatribe. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what it was about, which makes this a rather terrible story and therefore I shall cut it short at once. The point, however, is that I’ve had something resembling a blog for quite some time.

 

I use it to write about things that I care about.

 

It’s a pretty simple explanation, really.

 

Maybe a bit anticlimactic.

 

This is probably the part where I’m supposed to come out with some kind of Grand Statement (the sort of thing that goes in fortune cookies), like “Democracy is the One True Way and everyone who says otherwise or who doesn’t say so exactly the way I do should be drawn and quartered, or at the very least shot, you hear me?!” That certainly seems to be a popular sentiment. Or I could announce affiliation with the Democratic Party, I suppose, but to be honest, I’m none too fond of them; they’re a set of pusillanimous bastards. The Republican Party is quite out of the question.

 

I guess when it comes down to it, I’m not much of a group-joiner. (This is the other way of saying, “I’m not a team player,” which is the nice way of saying, “I’m going to do what I’m going to do no matter what you say.”) I’m a member of NOW. I’m a member of the ACLU. That’s about it. The thing about joining groups, the thing about committing yourself to one set of people…The thing is, when you do that, you commit yourself to one set of principles. And since I’m not in charge of any groups (and, in fact, hate being in charge as I view the necessity for leadership as an indication that the human race is insufficiently evolved), those principles aren’t going to be mine. They’ll match somewhat, of course. They’d have to for a group that I would even consider supporting.

 

But they won’t be identical.

 

And to go back to that statement up there, the one where I said, “I write about things I care about,” what I care about most is (cue dramatic violin solo) making the world a better place. I want equality. Not some kind of faux equality that gives women or Latinos or Nigerians or Swedes “what they’re suited to have” or that deprives them of fundamental human rights in the name of “family values” or that slaughters people from a distance “because they were gonna do it to us someday really they were!” I want the real deal, not something that kind of passes for it when you don’t look too close and you really shouldn’t look too close because come on, we got the thing our group was fighting for, didn’t we?

 

That’s why I don’t join groups.

 

That’s why I write.