Going Where I'm Most Appreciated. I have become a tad lackadaisical about updating this blog frequently, in large part because I am infernally busy and am now officially elderly (61, nearly 62), so have less energy to do the many things required of me, but more because I have another blog that is better received.
+
I started this political blog (which I refer to, in notes to myself, as my "polblog") April 15, 2004, and endeavored for many months to update it every day. I hoped to build a following, even without having any way to publicize it.
+
A bit less than one month later, on May 11, 2004, I started my Newark (NJ) blog. I reconceived it as a fotoblog on January 7, 2006.
+
In fotoblog form, that blog gives me artistic outlet as well as a way to tell the world how wonderful my hugely misperceived city is. I was not born in Newark, was not raised in Newark. I lived in the suburbs of New Jersey my entire childhood, then moved to Manhattan, where I spent 35 years in the heart of the most urban of all American environments. Then I tired of the cram-jammed Manhattan existence and escaped to a semi-suburban area of western Newark, where I have a three-story house (with basement) largely surrounded by 70-foot oaks, with room for flowers and veggies. I had not known how wonderful Newark is until my friend Joe, whom I met in Manhattan but who lives in Belleville, an immediate northern suburb of Newark, showed me around one day and talked up how Newark has everything a great city needs, even a subway.
+
He was right, and my discovering how right he was made me eager to create converts of other crammed-jammed Manhattanites, and especially gay men, into avowed Newarkers.
+
I now spend many hours taking pictures of my new city and its environs, fixing and cropping them in my graphics program, and uploading them to my Newark blog, which speaks to the good, and bad, of living in my Resurgent City.
+
That blog has developed a following. People actually contact me to say how much they appreciate my efforts. Rarely do I receive that kind of feedback and encouragement from readers of this blog.
+
One goes where the rewards are. In this, people are little different from the dogs that are trained by a treat after every successful performance of a trick, or dolphins or killer whales who are tossed a fish after they too perform a trick right.
+
The opposite is also true: we tend to avoid situations that prove unpleasant and unrewarding.
+
Writing a blog that works to give people information from which they might make their own judgments, and that does not just offer unsupported opinion, requires research. I have heretofore checked facts and looked for information to elucidate a topic that people might not have considered, and hyperlinked to such sources.
+
That takes time. I am very short of time.
+
Should I devote scant time to research that people might not even click to see? Or to taking fotografs and expressing myself visually (I hesitate to say "artistically", since my fotos are more expository than artsy) rather than only politically? Tough call.
+
I could simply do what so many commentators do: commentate, and let people inform themselves on what it is I'm commenting upon. It works for Rush Limbaugh and hosts of other Rightwingers, and that is part of what ticks me off.
+
Those blowhards, who have nothing constructive to say about anything and who have no generous impulses of any kind toward anyone, become hugely rich from their moronic commentaries, but I have to work in an office on things that do not much interest me just to keep ahead of my bills.
+
So, effective today, I will, for this blog, do research only on things I don't understand very well, and offer here only commentary.
+
If people need more info to know if what I say is wise, they can do the research themselves.
+
This way, I can comment regularly without exhausting myself by devoting time I don't have to looking up things that other people can check for themselves.
+
I scrupulously try never to misrepresent anything here. Frankly, too much of my research heretofore has been of a type intended to keep people from thinking I'm making it all up. Why should I have to do that?
+
I don't lie. (Well, not to strangers, and not ever about ideas. I might spare somebody's feelings with a little white lie about their personal behavior, but even then I'm sure that honesty almost always really is the best policy.) If people wish to believe I do, I cannot persuade them otherwise, and they should simply not read what I have to say. If they are inclined to believe I state the case correctly, but wish to check it, they can do their own Google and other searches.
+
From now on, I will add hyperlinks to sources not to prove that I know what I'm talking about, but only to add something of value to what I have to say — when I have the time. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and many, many others don't have to prove they know what they're talking about. Why should I?
+
Moreover, I have in this blog endeavored to ease the reading for sense of this blog by hiliting in bold and/or italics key text, such that noting only the hilited text would give readers a pretty good idea of what I'm trying to get across. But that in itself is very time-consuming, and, as I have said, I am very pressed for time.
+
So, hereafter, this blog will look much like others, with plain text almost everywhere. I will let readers supply their own emphasis — which might differ from mine.
+
In keeping with these new guidelines — no research and no supplied emphasis — today's unsupported commentary is about the "scandal" involving a Republican Congressman who resigned over 'improper', sexually suggestive emails and IMs he sent to minimally-underage male pages.
+
When is this country going to grow the f**k up about sex? The Republican Party, in adopting a viciously and vigorously antihomosexual and generally antisexual stance, has set itself up for precisely this kind of fall.
+
A 16- or 17-year-old boy is not a child, and the commentaries from female 'defenders of children' who have been all over the tube decrying this former Congressman's 'predatory' behavior are idiotic. Democrat enemies of Republicans have put themselves in the ugly position of condemning homosexuality! They thus join the very group of bigots they ordinarily condemn.
+
In much of the world, to this day, a 'child' of 15 or 16 is marriage material, because adulthood begins socially as it begins in nature: at the onset of puberty, round about age 13! Tho few Americans are familiar with Asian or African rituals surrounding the coming of age of children into adulthood at age 13, most Americans have heard of the Jewish celebration Bar Mitzvah, which welcomes 13-year-old boys to the community of adults. Given that girls mature earlier than boys, in Judaism girls are welcomed, by "Bas" or "Bat Mitzvah", to adulthood at age 12! Why, then, do we continue to pretend that 16- or 17-year-olds are children?
+
I had sex for the first time at age 13, as did hundreds upon hundreds of millions of other people. Why? Because that's when we're supposed to start having sex, when puberty hits. That is natural. Forbidding kids to have sex until age 18 or even 16 is unnatural — "against nature".
+
Republican Congressman Foley said 'lewd' things to teenage boys? So what? Who cares? Puberty, and thus biological maturity, occurs in the very first teen year, 13. All normal teenagers are biologically adult. It is only making a mountain out of a biological molehill that creates sexual activity in teen years into a big deal, even a crime. I thus mean it literally when I tell Republicans and the general public: "Grow the f**k up" about teen sex. Kids like sex as much as adults do, and it does them no more harm than it does adults.
+
It is only assigning more significance to sex than it actually has, that produces harm, and then only if a sexual relationship means a lot more to one partner than to the other. If both treat it as recreation, there is no harm done whatsoever. And so, I repeat, for Republicans and Democrats in Congress alike: GROW THE F**K UP about sex!
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,715 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM