I am thinking about abandoning this site. I’ve made four posts here in 2010. Two of them have been about politics. One of my earliest memories is of watching some coverage of the 1976 Democratic convention on TV with my dad. As a four year old, my fascination was with the hats they were wearing. It’s not exactly a political memory, but is something that I feel shows how early in my life I found myself influenced by or focused on something related to politics. I’ve been pretty well obsessed with politics ever since elementary school, though. I volunteered for my first campaign at 15. For the next decade, I volunteered for all sorts of city, county, state, and national campaigns. I was pretty sure that I wanted to run for and serve in elected office. That changed when I was struck with depression at 25. I emerged from that experience as an introvert. The outgoing, energetic me that relished the idea of campaigning was dead. I switched from a poli sci focus to a history focus for grad school partially as a result of that, but I never lost the interest in politics.

In the last year, I’ve found that I’m losing that interest. The environment is so toxic. The structure has been so altered by recent supreme court rulings that I don’t think we’ll have a functional political system again in my lifetime. I no longer really believe that much good can be done through the political system. At best, you can stave off some of the bad, maybe even roll some of the bad back at times. I think there are ways to do good and I’m kind of actively looking toward figuring one out that will work for me. I also kind of feel like blogging about politics is just an enormous waste of time. Unless you’re famous for doing it, I don’t think your words can ever establish a meaningful reputation or track record by which you’ll be judged. In a medium that is only words, your actions outside of it don’t matter either, again, unless you’re famous for them.

For the last six months, the fact that I actually use some email addresses associated with this domain has been the only thing that’s kept me from letting it expire. If I continue to feel about this site like I’ve felt for a while, this may be my last update. The domain expires in a couple months. I may renew it for one more year to have time to switch out the email addresses and archive some content. If I don’t see you here again, thanks for reading. Hopefully, I’ll see you somewhere else.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 11:34 am and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.