How and Why I Began Writing

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The Alamo in San Antonio

I had to travel 1,100 miles to begin writing. The writing began because I had emotions I couldn’t handle internally and had some vague notion that sharing these thoughts with others would help.

I believe it was a Thursday afternoon and my wife, youngest son and I had made a trip to a toy store to buy a birthday present. As we pulled through the outer parking lot of the giant mall, I heard gun shots. I sped up, moving away from where I thought the shots had come.

I remember that Julie asked why I did so and I told her those were gunshots. “I thought they were firecrackers,” she said.

“No, they were gunshots. I don’t think we would have heard firecrackers in the car with the air conditioner running.” We continued the discussion on the way home, with my wife holding out for firecrackers.

The next morning, the San Antonio Express-News had a front page story about a gang shoot-out near a bus stop in the mall parking lot. Two rival gangs happened to show up at the bus stop at the same time and the insults, curses and general smack talk began. Then someone said something that someone else responded to with a pistol. Quickly, multiple people were firing wildly at each other.

Despite the flurry of shots, the gang-bangers were unscathed. One woman, minding her own business as she sat waiting on a bus, was killed by a stray shot.

I’m ashamed to say that I don’t remember the woman’s name. I should remember because the event had a lasting effect on me. I do remember that she was a never-married, middle-aged church secretary. She lived with and cared for her invalid father who was no longer able to live alone.

The senselessness of this woman’s death, caused by a young person who obviously put little value on his own life, was absurd. It simply was not the way life was supposed to work. The woman could not afford a car, so she had to take the bus. Life seemed to have taken the long way around to bring her to that bus stop on a particular Thursday afternoon when words turned into bullets and life turned into death.

I think it was the futility, the absolute hopelessness of the situation that drove me to write about it. As if I could define the event, put it in writing, then I could exert some control over it and thus my own life. Believe me, I’m writing about this with far more insight now than I had at the time. Back then, I only knew I had to write about it.

I didn’t submit my piece to a San Antonio newspaper. Instead I mailed it to my hometown newspaper, The Dodge County News. The editor was a long-time friend and he liked it. In retrospect, it was far too sentimental, but he printed it as a column with the understanding that there would be more. I agreed and began writing.

In the beginning, I wrote about different things, but my focus always came back to politics. Soon, my column From Where I Stand focused almost entirely on politics. Occasionally, I would write about some local event, but it was nearly all politics.

Why Create a New Blog?

One of the great advantages of blogging over writing a newspaper column is that a person can have a blog for all areas of interest. That's good for me because I have a nomadic mind; it wanders all over the place. Like a regular newspaper column, a blog needs some common themes to explore. The threads that I believe will bring these far-flung thoughts in this blog together are curiosity and appreciation.

Questions are wonderful things, they bring us knowledge; though sometimes that knowledge is not the knowledge we sought. Just learning to bring forth the right question is an education in itself. Attempting to understand the information our questions deliver is still more education of a different type altogether. By asking a question, we acknowledging our ignorance and begin the process of becoming wiser than we were.

Image via WikipediaIn my other regular blog, where I analyze political policies and strategies, it's not easy to slide in a post on quantum physics or baseball or Christianity or even the wonderful philosophical questions common to mankind. It's almost as hard to slide in a reference to Groucho Marx as it is to reference a question of eternity. It's a kind of structural straitjacket.

We all need an occasional escape. This is my Houdini blog - a blog where I can slip out of the necessary confines that hold my other blogs together. My restriction here is only self-discipline.

At my age, there are so many things I still want to know and I think that's a wonderful thing. To consider the alternative, that I would live a life of little or no intellectual curiosity, is more frightening to me than death. In the first instance, surely I have lost myself and in the second, I hope to find my true self. Time will eventually tell.

I think that to be sane, we have to question those things that don't make sense to us. We will never answer all of our questions and don't even have the capacity to understand some of the answers we do receive. After we get our information, we have to be prepared to discard those things which truly offend our sensibilities. To continue to tolerate things which should not be tolerated is a sure path to madness.

One additional thought on questions. If we fail to answer questions honestly, then asking the question is only an exercise in self-deception and will not yield useful answers.

In the meantime, when I want to write about some of my favorite things, I have an outlet. I hope we both enjoy this. I hope to get feedback from you that covers both the good and the bad aspects of my blog.

As always, thanks for reading.