A NEW RESOLVE

It has been a while since I did very much of anything in the blogosphere, aside from posting my own thoughts on The Buddha Diaries once in a while. Was a time when I posted almost daily and enjoyed exchanges with a network of fellow bloggers, but I have allowed much of that to lapse in these past three, now going on four difficult years. Just lately, I have been posting here no more than a couple of times a week... if that.

I have a history in the territory. I stumbled into the blogosphere, all ignorance, the day after the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. Following up on America's disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, his success stunned me. It was clear already that the war had not only been a terrible mistake, it was a mistake we had committed based on what were by that time widely discredited lies. Those "weapons of mass destruction" had only ever existed in the minds of the warmongers (Cheney, Rumsfeld...) in the Bush administration. Their motivation was not to preserve the security of America and the world, but to secure the nation's oil supply. 

Thanks largely to more recent events, Bush the younger has morphed magically into a benign patriarch, painting surprisingly creditable pictures quietly on his Texas ranch. Back then, at the time of his re-election, he seemed to many of us to be evil personified. Appalled by his re-election, I started to ask myself: what can I do? I have to do something, but what can I possibly do? 

The only thing I do know how to do is write, and I was wandering around somewhat aimlessly on the Internet on my computer with all this in mind when something--I no longer remember what it was--sucked me down the digital rabbit hole and, fortuitously, onto something called a "blog." There was even a button right there in front of me inviting me to start one and informing me, alluringly, of the first step: to find a title. With scarcely a second thought, I typed in: The Bush Diaries.

That's how it started. The Bush Diaries soon turned into a near-daily, slightly irreverent letter to our then president. I called him, impertinently, "Bush." No "Mr.", no "President", and certainly no "Mr. President." Just Bush. I had a lot of fun writing those entries, over 800 of them between 2004 and 2009. By 2009, though, I had had enough and, thankfully we had a new president. I was tired, I wrote, of waking up with Bush in bed with me each morning. The last entry, The Last Chapter, was written on January 16, 2009, a few days before the inauguration of Barak Obama. 

The Buddha Diaries was the successor to The Bush Diaries. Checking out the archive, I note that the first entry was A Commitment, dating from January 29, 2007, two years before I finally abandoned The Bush Diaries, so I must obviously have been working on the two of them simultaneously for a while. If my stats have it right, this current post will be the 2,717th entry in the blog to which I have devoted much of my writing time in the past decade. Importantly, too, with The Buddha Diaries, I began to develop online friendships and associations, and to be active in a network of like-minded bloggers.

Years passed. Obama was re-elected in 2012. The 2016 presidential election brought us Donald J. Trump... As one who had found the politics of George W. to be objectionable, I was incredulous. Reason led me to believe--correctly, as it turned out--that what lay ahead was a hundred times worse. Yet I recoiled with utter distaste from the notion of a "Trump Diaries." And I had The Buddha Diaries for my (now less frequent) posts.

Still, brought up with a nagging social conscience, I have always felt it important to make my voice heard in political as well as other matters (contemporary ethics and religion, books and movies, art...) and many of my early entries were, as I remember, devoted to social and political matters. Once I became aware of the social media though, and particularly of Facebook, I began to place those observations where they were likely to reach a larger audience; and once Tr*mp came along, it seemed to me all the more important to devote my writing energies in that direction. 

Meanwhile, my entries in The Buddha Diaries became less frequent, and I'm thinking now is a good time, if any, to return to a saner and healthier world than Facebook. It will take some work to renew old contacts and make new ones, but that is my intention. Please let me know if you'd like to exchange blog links, and how to contact you. And I'll keep hunting and pecking around...

See you in the blogosphere!