Why am I Blogging? (Part 2)

At this point, this blog has a readership of about two. Maybe four at the most. Do I want a larger readership? Eventually. But first, I want to persuade you. It is ourselves we must change.

I don’t think I can convey how unbelievably fortunate we are that a Missouri farmer accidentally became President and set us, against all odds, on a course of frightfully subtle economic, political, and diplomatic action that avoided direct war with the Soviet Union and Communist China while containing the one and courting the other. Call it blind, dumb luck. Call it the hidden hand of God. But please, don’t ever count on it happening again. That is not how our participative, representative democracy is designed to work.

I am blogging for two reasons.

I need a workshop in which to examine how to discharge my duty as a citizen of the United States and as a human. I cannot leave my burden of responsibility to the next person. I cannot entrust it to some leader - even one I vote for. My opportunities to discharge that duty are greatly limited by my need to scratch out a living, express myself artistically, and manage to get myself into better physical health. But from those to whom much is given, much is expected. And I have been given a lot. As a middle-class American, I am easily in the top 30% of the happiest, most comfortable people in the world. My debt, therefore, is enormous.

The second, and equally important reason is to persuade you, my at this moment two-or-at-the-most-four readers, to re-examine your duty as a citizen and as a human. I know you personally. I believe you have even more to offer in the way of serious thought and leadership than I do. I am not trying to persuade you to spread my world view. I am trying to persuade you to use your knowledge and involve your friends and everyone you trust as an intellectual, a humanist, and a patriot, to build a community that will create a new world view.

In my previous blogs, I discussed the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary process. But there is no Harry Truman. Maybe there is a JFK, but if you remember, JFK was no great visionary when elected. He was a fairly average American who experienced a stupendous revelation in the midst of the Bay of Pigs disaster. If it weren’t for that disaster and the soul searching it led Kennedy to do, our nation and our species might never have survived the Cuban missile crisis.

We cannot trust any leader. We must choose one, but even the best leader will be helpless to dig us out of our current crop of species-survival-threatening quagmires without a groundswell in popular American opinion about how to face these crises.

So I am asking you, as an intellectual, please get involved. Re-examine your world view. Re-examine everything you believe about America and our role in the world. Re-examine your ethics. And re-examine your ideas about what citizenship means. Can you help develop the philosophical and ethical underpinnings for such a critically needed sea change in American popular opinion? Can you help create the mechanisms that will create and guide that sea change?

rbs