Some Changes

When I started this blog 2 and a half years ago, it was mostly an intensely personal blog. I was reeling from the murder of my close friend Mark, and dealing with a couple of other things-- the loss of a teaching job I loved, and my father having cancer.

These days, things are calmer. My father is doing well. I'm getting ready to start school for one last career, one that I have a feeling will be my most fulfilling yet. And at the end of the summer, the guy who took my friend's life will go on trial for that murder (he's going on trial for the murder of one of the accomplices, who he was afraid was going to "roll" on him, at the end of this month).

My blog will remain personal-- I still find it a nice venue for thinking out loud, for writing a little about the wonder I find in life, no matter what difficulties are thrown my way, and of course like any parent, I love braggin' on my kids.

I've always had a pretty big political component in my blog, and occasionally a little history. I plan on doing all the other things, but would like to expand the history part of it. My ideal roll model for this is Erik's blog, which blends the historical, political, artistic and personal as nicely as I've seen it done in the blogosphere. And I'd like to get back to blogging every day. As busy as I am, these days, I find blogging rewarding.

When you talk to most people, and ask them what subject they found most boring, it is frequently history. I don't think it's the fault of history-- it's the fault of historians. History is innately interesting-- a fact not always conveyed adequately by some historians.

In 1994, I went to visit one of my closest friends, Viktor Zeitgeist, in Frankfurt, Germany, where he was living at the time. One day, we were walking through downtown Frankfurt, and he pointed out some ruins right in a central plaza there. He told me the story about it: the town of Frankfurt had decided to build a new city hall. When they began excavating for it, the construction workers ran into ruins. It turned out that the ruins were Roman. Previously, it had not been believed that the Romans were in that area. That day, the ruins, which had lain there for more than a thousand years, changed history.

History is alive, never dead, and moving, never static. It's essential to understanding our present and our future. Blogger Kristi recently discovered one of my favorite quotes about history, by George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Watching our "leaders" make mistakes recently that had entirely predictable results (banking deregulation, an unnecessary war, etc.), those words have never rung truer.