A new day dawns

I’m starting off on a new writing adventure. I’m now going to be writing as the Rochester Independent Political Examiner for the examiner.com news site. Examiner is a news site in its own right, but more importantly is a feed site for many other news outlets and aggregators. The hope is that this will expose me to a wider audience. Not that I don’t love and value the audience I have… just think of it more like I’m out looking for new friends for you.

More importantly, this gives me a paid writing gig to put on my resume. Not that I expect to make much money, just that I want to be able to claim I’m being paid. Which brings me to another important point. The pay and the rankings of the articles I write are heavily influenced by reader traffic and subscriptions. So it would really help prime the pump if my readers here went and clicked around a bit there.

“But,” I can hear you asking, “where is there?” Well, this is a link to my page at Examiner. There is an RSS feed and lots of sharing options so if you’re of a mind to share article links or subscribe, all the better. Fair warning though, I seeded the site with some of the posts already shared on this blog, so anything dated Aug 10th should be old news for you.

For your convenience going forward, links to my new Examiner posts will be pushed to my Twitter and Facebook feeds. So if you’re following either of those now, you’ll be aware of new articles. As for this blog, while most of the “Politics” category will now be published on Examiner, I will continue to post other content here that isn’t appropriate for that venue.

Finally, a plea about comments. Facebook often generates the most comments on my posts. I don’t want to discourage that, especially for comments with a personal slant. But for topical comments, it would be great if you posted them directly to the Examiner articles. I’m hopeful we’ll generate some good discussion over there, and I’d love you all to be a part of that.

I do want to thank those of you who have provided support and encouragement for my writing. I’m not sure where this is going yet, and it’s just a baby step. But it’s a start.

Stay tuned…

The Need to Feel Threatened

I’ve believed that most people don’t steal, they don’t kill, and they don’t rape and pillage because at their core they believe it’s wrong. But a couple of recent comments have caused me to ponder just how much of our world is held together by force. I don’t mean forces like gravity or the strong nuclear force, but rather the threat of punishment.

A commenter on the recent post contrasting the 2nd and 14th amendments opined, “the 2nd amendment is there to allow citizens to fight off an oppressive government, whether a foreign one or our own. But the most important reason for it ,is to preserve our God given right of self defense..Without the 2nd amendment…all the other ones can be taken away.” The underlying theme of his comment seems to be that governments only behave because of the constant palpable threat of insurrection by the people.

In a completely different vein, another person opined regarding atheism that he could never himself be an atheist because he felt there would then be no reason not to just get up every morning and do whatever he felt like. He feared that without the threat of God’s wrath, he’d become a complete hedonist.

In both these cases, the people are ordinary everyday folks. These are not borderline criminals or people you would otherwise fear. Yet they both seem to feel it is only the threat of punishment that keeps their world from falling into chaos.

This is causing me to seriously question whether these two guys are an anomaly or whether they actually represent a far greater portion of the population than I might have expected. If it is only by force that much of this world is held together, then maybe that explains some things. Perhaps this is the underlying motivation behind those who would seek to impose rigid rules with draconian punishments on the minutiae of our lives. Whether those rules are religious, political, or just organizational, they are the rope that binds their own worlds from bursting apart, and they wish to assure that no one else operates outside those constraints.

It’s understandable that if you feel that without being strapped to your seat you’d be running amok in the cabin that you would question the motives and actions of anyone not similarly bound. It’s not that I thought these people didn’t exist, but rather that they existed at the fringes of society, not in its mainstream. And I’m now coping with the dawning realization this may be a naive view.

The ease with which looting and rioting break out in otherwise civilized cities is perhaps further indication we are not as evolved as I might have hoped. Maybe we are really just very large children, constrained only by the watchful gaze of a parent figure. Yearning to be free of that yoke and run wild through the neighborhood.

If true, a sad reality indeed.