On the hills

The light burns in the land of Eternal Twilight
It has its time but is quickly obscured
Gray and green rule and their reign is not tested
I am not of this land

My land is far across the sea
It calls to me
Its voice made louder by the waves
Just yesterday I pondered leaving
Now I know home

I have become addicted to her moods
I think on her often
She that fed me from birth
Her ways have become mine

Soon I will leave this land
I will soar away
I have left no mark upon it
Has it left a mark on me?

The Third Party... Racists

I was reminded that the Democratic party aligned with the Ku Klux Klan.  Many people will simply ignore this as rhetoric.  However, we should not ignore this.  There are a large group of people that are not aligned to a party but to hatred.

The Dixiecrats, Strom Thurman, George Wallace... they may have been labeled Democrats at one point.  They may have referenced "states rights", but it has always been the same.  At the moment, the hate mongers have aligned with the Republican party.  I need not provide evidence for this, the nomination has already taken place.

Time and again, politicians have made references to stereotypes to further their agendas.  The references may have been less obvious in other cases, but the truth is that "the race card" is played by the hate mongers in nearly every election year.

We should not simply ignore misinformation and half-truths.  We must call out all direct and indirect racism.  The re-emergence of more direct racism is not really surprising.  The hate mongers have always been there.  They will always be there.  We must identify them.  We must stop pretending that we are talking about a tiny fraction of the population.  Hate is commonplace.

The lines have been drawn.  Open racism has again reared its head.  We must all now choose how to react.

In search of an audience...

I can not say I write only for the love of the written word.  I desire feedback, interaction, readers, viewers, etc.  I have recently been considering transitioning to a video blog for precisely this purpose.  Blogs seem to be a disappearing medium.  Audio and video have replaced the written word several times, and so this is not surprising.

After all, we humans developed the written word relatively recently.  All communication was interpersonal at one point and a great deal of our communication still is.  The written word is also not ideal for the conveying of emotion.  It invokes emotion, but conveying it is difficult when the inflection of a voice is taken out of the equation.  There have been some recent attempts to compensate for this, but they fall short.

I can not say whether I will end up doing this.  I'm not particularly photogenic, nor am I great public speaker.  My voice will probably be lost in the sea of content just as my words are here.