Then again, I write as someone who's only dipped his toe into blogging from time to time. Perhaps something in my soul tells me I'm stranded on a desert island and need to send a message in a bottle.
But maybe there's more to blogging than I've considered. Maybe my perspective has been overly self absorbed.
What if there is good to be done in sharing ideas? What if I have questions, observations, doubts, assertions, etc. that someone out there could benefit from considering?
We live in a jaded, cynical, spin-filled world. It can be hard to see past that mountain of scoffing internal objections.
I recently finished listening to The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson (good read, by the way!). In it, Johnson talks about how the cholera epidemics in London in the mid 19th century required a dual perspective that was difficult to balance.
A microscopic understanding was needed to see an adversary, the Vibrio cholerae bacteria, that was smaller than the naked eye can perceive. A glass of water might look clean in a cursory glance, but a more intimate examination would reveal the tiny killer of thousands.
But a macro understanding of the waste management and water supply system was also needed, perhaps more urgently, in order to convince a skeptical public and scientific community that had come to believe firmly that cholera and other illness was spread by noxious smells in the air, what was known as the Miasma Theory. Without a larger perspective of how the current infrastructure of London was actually poisoning it's people, the status quo was going to keep leading to epidemics as bad or worse than those current and previous, since London was already the largest city in the world, in history, at the time, and was sitll growing.
So what does that have to do with my blogging or not? Well, here's what I'm wondering: What if the problems of our world are not just inevitable? What if fatalism has it wrong? What if there is some good that an individual can do, and what is needed is thoughtful, considerate persons willing to take an honest look at the situation and brainstorm in an open way for solutions.
Sure, such can be done privately, and I suppose it must be done at least privately, at least at first. But what good is it if considerations are only private when the fix is needed on a large scale, not just in my life?
Sure, it's great to see Vibrio cholerae in a microscope, but the benefit is limited if you can't zoom out and recognize how problems of infrastructure are spreading the little bug.
Just so, it's fine for me to examine problems on my own, mind my own business and tend to my private life using what conclusions I've drawn from my private ponderings. I'm not just living a private life, however. So even if I do mind my own business, what's going on in the greater outside world will eventually affect me.
Doesn't that mean that, to some extent, what goes on in the outside world is my business also? Don't I have some responsibility to engage with the problems of my day?
