Welcome to this Column

And thank you all for your support. Here's what I'm trying, and with your patience will succeed in doing.

Thank you for signing up to this site.  I appreciate, very much, your trust (feeling, hope) that you won’t be wasting your time by occasionally looking at what I have to say.  There are over 130 subscribers.  Several of you are new, as a result of a recent appeal I made on Facebook. 

Therefore, let me take this opportunity to explain what I am trying to do.

I don’t want to be partisan.  The more I write the more I realize that all of us flock to simple answers.  Do we sharpen our partisan positions for clarity or as weapons?  Let’s do our best to offer our ideas as a pledge for further discussion and education.  I know it’s difficult and it’s why I need your patience and support and why I’ll try to give you mine. 

My blogs usually start with an idea while I am reading in the morning. That happens almost every day.  (So I have to assume that many are repetitive and trivial.)  It then gets written down in brief form and if I’m rested or caffeined gets elaborated.  If I decide I want to publish it, it gets scheduled (I’m about two months ahead right now) and, the week before I share it, undergoes daily revisions. 

I hope it turns out to be non-partisan, with something to say of value to all points of view, but I don’t try to be “down the middle.”  A lifetime of travel, studying politics and government, and working within and alongside local government (also poetry and baseball) have given me a bias.  In general, I hope, a bias toward rigor, fact, reason, and concern for fairness, and opportunity for all people.  I also can’t rid myself of a genuine bias toward hope, and faith in the future---if we just get a few more things right and find the paths of agreement.

Soon I hope to make use of the “thread” option on the newsletter site.  I would like to moderate serious discussions of “big” issues.  (I note today flipping channels that Fox can’t get over our withdrawal from Afghanistan and MSNBC wants faster subpoenas to get at what’s behind Jan. 6th. )  Our media is unlikely to help us stay focused on the critical issues that need to be studied and the choices that must be made.

I believe there is plenty to learn from our partisan friends and from our political foes.  We are all in this together.  I still think of the world as a small craft.  Adlai Stevenson said,

"We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserve of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation by the care, the work, and I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.”

And I would add, the love we give each other.