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It has been more than three months since I last posted in this space—and no, I’m not crippled, demented, or dead. Just … keeping my own counsel.
For more than ten years now, I have been posting weekly blogs on my author’s website, copying the content to Blogspot, and then alerting readers to each new posting with teaser lines on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. This is my way of keeping in touch.
My blog posts have generally covered three broad categories: politics and economics, science and religion, and various art forms. I try to keep a mix of topics in order to maintain general reader interest. When I write about the first two categories, I try to be generic and philosophical. I try not to comment on specific political programs or current economic issues but test my own thoughts about the background and drivers of the political scene and the economic effects. I don’t promote a particular view of religion, although I am an ardent believer in science. And my view of art in all its forms explores linkages between the written word—my specialty—and other ways of telling stories.
I try to be circumspect in my presentation, not being too political or fanatical, because I am more interested in origins than actions. Also, I know that many of my readers, friends, and family members have views that are sometimes opposed to my own, and I don’t want to alienate them.
My own political views are basically traditional and conservative. I consider myself a classic liberal, concerned with everyone’s personal freedom, individual action, and responsibility. I am not a fanatic about nearly anything. I try to see all sides of an argument and, when deep in a thought, sometimes wonder if I might be wrong about what I think and believe.
Although I was raised in the Christian tradition with no particular emphasis on observance and churchgoing, I am an atheist. That does not mean that I believe in nothing, as I believe in the human mind’s power to understand and in the evolutionary force that drives life on Earth toward greater complexity and efficiency. But I lack the gene or whatever it is in the brain that allows a person to feel God’s presence or hear His voice.
I have been carrying on this one-sided conversation with my friends and readers for more than ten years, and I thought there was space in the middle to examine these ideas dispassionately. But the political scene has changed in the last couple of years. Positions have become more polarized and rigid. The right and left sides of the aisle no longer view the opposite camp as merely mistaken in their premises but honest in their intent. That was how I was brought up: with charity and clarity, championing politicians like Everett Dirksen and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who could appreciate a middle ground, yet stand their own, and gain respect from their peers, even across the aisle. But now politics has become a knife fight: the other side is evil, stupid, and must be destroyed.
I see an ascendency of opinions and positions that ten years ago, even five years ago, would have been considered lunacy. For example, encouraging children long before puberty to question their own sexuality and preferably choose another, and public figures being unable to define biological sex or value its role in society. Or printing unlimited numbers of dollars for government spending under “modern monetary theory,” and the federal government being deliberately vague about what might constitute monetary inflation or economic recession. And to be frank, we have elected as President—supposedly by an overwhelming margin, in the “most honest election of all time”—an aged politician who was always a nonentity, was often laughed at by his own party, and is now clearly demented, mumbling and stumbling. This is the man who must lead us in an increasingly hostile and dangerous world. And he chose as Vice President a woman who clearly despised and denigrated him during the presidential primary campaign, dropped out of the race early, and has proven herself in office to be witless and incoherent. But she fulfills two prime categories of demographic identity, so all hail. Meanwhile, common sense and charity, the value of religious belief and individual action … these qualities are being publicly demeaned as foolish and bred of evil intent. I just …
Stop me before I start spewing red lava and spinning conspiracy theories. I shouldn’t even be writing this. So, for the past three months, and for a span of months before that, I have been biting my tongue, keeping my public mouth shut, averting my eyes, and trying to quiet my inquiring mind.
So forgive me, readers, if I appear to have dropped off the radar. I just … cannot trust myself to speak plainly anymore.