Here are summaries of a few of the questions or email messages that I’ve received recently. It’s a brief part of a larger correspondence, with no particular theme. I’ve summarized them, but they accurately reflect the questions and my original replies.
Why don’t you write much about the school issues? Don’t you realize that schools are the biggest topic in town? Well, perhaps schools are the biggest topic in town; I’m not sure. I’ll agree that they’re among the biggest. I’ve written mostly on other matters, but just last week I had a post about an upcoming candidate search for our middle school.
(As I’m the one who publishes this website, I’ve the advantage of posting about schools before using that post to reply to a reader’s contention that I don’t write about schools enough. An advantage, I know.)
I’ll follow the district more closely this year.
Aren’t you worried about the direction of the city? I’m an optimist: we’ve had tough times, we’ll yet have more, but reliance on the ineffectual policies of the last decade cannot (and so will not) continue much longer.
I’m convinced that the New Deal failed to produce a better economy, but there is one way in which I admire and respect the New Dealers: they cared about the condition of common men and women. They enumerated the problems they saw around them – copiously – because they rightly understood that a better tomorrow required a candid today.
We have significant afflictions of poverty and stagnation. I’ve no respect for those who address these real problems by not addressing them.
Happy talk in these circumstances is mostly self-serving, sometimes laughable, and always unworthy of us.
We’ll have a New Whitewater, and sooner than many realize.
Don’t you feel sorry for Ryan Braun? Although his mistakes are his own, I do think that’s sad. I feel worse, though, for the team that will struggle either with his role on the team, or with trying to trade such an expensive player. There’s no good news for Braun or the Brewers in any of this.
Is all government spending really bad? No. There’s too much of it, though.
How much work is blogging? It’s not any, because it’s not work. I’m (mostly) a watchdog blogger, but that’s a not job, it’s a commitment. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook pages, and dozens of other new media with which I’m unversed: they’re all means of political or social commentary.
All things are limited by time and cost, but some seemingly less so, as one readily and happily commits to them. They seem, in this way, almost without effort, as the things one truly loves seem effortless.
All people have pursuits like this; they simply differ in which pursuits.
From a discussion with a fellow blogger this morning, about blogging: what’s important for a blogger? There are several important things, but I mentioned a certain point.
One should be one’s own publisher (or one’s own editor, if one thinks of editing principally as the selection of topics and ideas.) This really comes down to writing what one would like to write – what one enjoys – and having control over one’s own agenda.
Bloggers should think of themselves as writers, editors, publishers, all of those roles. This characteristic underlies them all: to be one’s own man or woman.
Let’s have more dog videos. Well, sure: here’s one of a dog who has better ideas than simply fetching. (It’s not a fail – he’s simply focused on a different goal.)