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On Tuesday, November 7th, 2016, the Empire of Illusion succeeded in taking over America.

For the past fifty years, two versions of America have been jockeying for control of the destiny of the nation.

The first America, now a minority, is a dying tribe of literate folk who function in a print-based world, people who regularly question themselves and can soberly address the complexities of the world.

The second America- which I will call the “Empire of Illusion” (and I borrow the coinage from Chris Hedges, who wrote a brilliant book of the same name)- has retreated into a fantasyland of blind patriotism and false certainties. This tribe, which has steadily grown in numbers over the past half century, sees the world as black and white and is incapable of discerning truth from illusion.

Continue reading “The Two Americas”

So, then. If you’re reading this right now, I suspect you came here for one of a variety of reasons:  perhaps you saw a link on social media; maybe I recommended the site to you. Hopefully you’re a stranger, drawn here out of genuine curiosity.

Nonetheless, you’ve come to my blog, and I thank you for that. This marks the beginning of a journey, for both myself and those of you who love the same things as I.

I won’t keep you long: no one likes vapid writing devoid of substance. So I’ll get to the point.

I decided to start a blog because I was tired of seeing the world burn while feeling powerless to extinguish the flames.

In my short life, I’ve been blessed to experience a large chunk of this planet. I’ve come to love the world.

But since my earliest memories, I’ve seen horrible things slowly sucking the life from the world, devouring it, destroying it in the name of stupidity and blindness and arrogance. Recent developments over the past few years (of which I won’t bother to discuss right now) have only inflamed this pattern of self-destruction.

For the longest time I falsely believed that you could make substantial changes in the world by ranting to sympathetic friends, or through unleashing your furies on long-winded social media posts.

I was wrong.

You have to put in the extra effort. You have to go the extra mile.

That said: this blog will be a compendium of journalism, essays, and stories documenting my opinions about the world and my experiences in it. The philosophy that anchors this whole project simple: to awaken ourselves to the wonder of the world, and to do as much possible to stop its self-destruction.

Haters (as us millennials would say) will be quick to tell me that this blog won’t make a difference, that no one is going to read it, and that it is so small it will be swallowed into the infinite white noise of the internet. I laugh at the nihilism of haters: they criticize others because they lack the drive (or the balls) to accomplish anything meaningful for themselves.

I would tell the haters this: how everything great that ever changed the world started out infinitesimally small. Every accomplishment that ever meant something, every work of art or literature, every movement or revolution, started in silent anonymity.

Great things attain their aura of grandeur only retrospectively, when we look back into the past, as we forget how small they were to begin with.

The whole universe, after all, began as just a lump of molecules.

I’m starting this blog because I want to make my dent on the universe: to try to change things in the world, to uplift people, to show history that, no matter how many people sat out complacently on the sidelines, there was at least one good man who fought to extinguish the flames.

Thank you for coming to my blog. I’m looking forward to this journey.