While driving recently I saw a truck that had a large amount of colored tape on it in the form of letters. What did these letter say? They were various negative phrases and statements in regards to President Obama and the healthcare bill. And on the back was the driver's final and perhaps most important statement to the public--Your Vote Counts!!!

I thought to myself, "There goes another idiot." However, I soon after began to think about what it was that drive a man to spend that much time, the passion one has to have to go so far as to risk whatever reputation they have and put their opinion out into public to be judged by coworkers, friend, family and neighbors.

Traditionally our country has been a country that was shaped and molded by its citizens, created by farmers, tradesmen, and militia. The working class had power and made their voices heard, albeit we must grant that it is easier to make changes to a foundation before you've already built a house on it.

Great writers and thinkers in American history, Whitman and Thoreau to name a few, spoke out about the citizens right and obligation to fix what is broken, to change what is unjust as it pertains to our government and the governance of its people. This was the song that was sung throughout American history in the face of war, slavery, taxes, and civil rights issues.

So the question I ultimately posed to myself upon reading the writing on this man's truck was, "Is this guy a nut, and no one would think me odd for saying this, or is this man in keeping with his obligation as a citizen of this democratic nation? Perhaps even he is not doing enough."

All of us take issue with some policy, regulation, or other facet of this enormous bureaucracy in which we live, and we take it on the chin day after day. Why? Why aren't all of us making statements about it. Why are we all not marching on Washington. I will concede that we have recently seen in the news the forming of tea parties and protestors, but this is only a small portion of our countries citizens acting on their convictions if we consider the population of this country. While I don't agree with some of the goingson at the tea parties, and the recent, misguided efforts of healthcare protestors, they are doing what our founding fathers and predecessors did when they forged our country in to the United States so many years ago.

But, the true question is why citizens of this country seem so content to sit back as spectators while our country is run by so few? Quite simply the sheer size of our country mixed with the unfathomable shadow cast over us by the U.S. government. What can one person do? What can

A Starting Point

I was recently pilfering through a collection of essays and came across an intriguing notion by Mr. James Harvey Robinson, a post-modern historian. His essay, entitled Four Kinds of Thinking, attempts to explain the shift in cognitive function from the modern to post-modern eras. He says in his essay,"On inspection we shall find that even if we are not downright ashamed of a great part of our spontaneous thinking it is far too intimate, personal, ignoble or trivial to permist us to reveal more than a small part of it."

The point Robinson makes here is quite an intruiging notion to consider. How "trivial" have our day to day interactions become? How impersonal have we grown to be in our relationships both intimate and social because we are ashamed or detrimentally self-aware. What limitations have we set for ourselves never to be broached and what are the consequences? I contemplate these inferred suppositions set forth by Robinson because it recently struck me that this should be the goal of my writing. On a larger scale perhaps, the answering of these questions and solving of these problems should be the goal of our lives.

This piece will not necessarily be narrative or expository as future installments surely will, but I feel it is necessary to tell any readers, presently or in the future, that this blog will be a platform of honesty that is, as James Harvey Robinson put it, "intimate, personal, ignoble". And perhaps, though it is not my aim, trivial. Because no matter how you view the world there are rather trivial aspects, and these aspects demand their moment too.

Consider this piece a road sign for bumpy roads ahead because a warning seems to melodramatic. But the writing henceforth may be offensive to some, but it will be honest and endearing.