Two Years Old Today

Today, this little website is two years old. The site -- like myself -- is growing up. It hopes one day to move the world just a little, but is afraid sometimes that it never will, seeing as, on its second birthday, it can barely open the door, or use a spoon or fork properly, or speak more than one hundred words. A two year old is no longer a baby. He's staring his future in the face, and is uneasy at the prospect. Here's an essay I wrote about this site. Hope you enjoy it.

I have to admit, my first cyber-tour of the "blogosphere" left me a bit skeptical. Is it true that any dilettante in his pajamas can get a "blog," toss together some half-baked musings and post them for the world to see? Is that sanitary? Where are the fact-checkers? Where are the referees? Look at all the typos!

I feel silly now, that in my trepidation, I overlooked the fact that no one ever said free speech was supposed to be clean and grammatical. It should be boisterous, unruly and unapologetic, and the Internet is just that. In one fitful stroke it empowers both brilliance and bigotry, pitting one post's flaws against another's, dogma against dogma, prejudice against prejudice, hoping that truth rises to the top of the labyrinthine pile of incoherency and inaccuracy. Sure, the Internet is not authoritative, but, in all of its blemishes, obscenities, inanity, and openness, it is the ultimate free marketplace of ideas. Blogs don't claim to be correct, only curious.

So, throwing caution to the wind, I started my own website, TheLiberalConviction.com. "Liberal" not as ideology - the set of policies and doctrines of, say, the Democratic Party - but as a value system. Liberal in the sense that nothing can be said with absolute certainty, that everything deserves a critical lens of examination. Liberal in the sense that I'm not expecting easy conclusions about eternity, life or the universe's marvelous structure of reality. Liberal in the hope that I remain always curious about my world, always asking questions, and always hungry to comprehend a little more of its mystery.

The blogosphere has aggregated just about anything under the sun. The other day, I was watching a QuickTime video of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. In a moment, it fluttered around, darting up and down in the sky, beautiful and free. The butterfly, I realized, doesn't add much to the power of the state or to the wealth of corporations. Like curiosity, it has its own reason for existing. Blogs are wonderful because they let the butterfly in all of us free. They might not have answers about the world, but at least they're daring enough pose questions.