The TucsonCitizen.com is a community of bloggers. Belonging to such a community has both advantages and disadvantages and in the course of time The Data Port has belonged to three different communities.

The first was the Salon Blogs group, which is where I did my first blogging. The writers were pretty much what you might expect from a group of Salon readers. Softly leftish, literary, and as likely to post about poetry and music as about politics. For the most part the individual  blogs were pretty to look at.

Looking back I don’t remember that the web was characterized by what we know today as “social media.” I suppose the the first blogs were the social media. You advertised and promoted your own blog by reading other blogs and writing the authors to tell them that you were adding them to your  blogroll. The hope, of course, was that they would respond in kind.

Salon wound down its support for the blogging community and many drifted off to Blogspot, but the sense of community was lost in the sheer size of the Blogspot universe.

The Data Port was happy with Blogger, which was easy to use, and it became active in the blogosphere that grew up around Gabrielle Giffords’ first run for Congress. The blog became much less general and more political.

Eventually, after the emotional Sturm und Drang of that first campaign subsided, The Data Port was picked up by Lefty Blogs and anything of a strictly left wing political nature appeared there. If I blogged about motorcycles, poetry, or the little disturbances of man I wouldn’t make the cut. (Lefty Blogs seems to be dead, by the way. If not, I’d be glad to hear from readers where it’s gone or what has taken its place.)

Being part of a blogging community has advantages and disadvantages that vary according to the nature of the community. One advantage trumps everything else: If you want your blog to be read you’re better off writing cheek by jowl with others in a community of writers. If your blog is posted on a site that regularly attracts readers, your own blog is more likely to be read…or at least looked for. The Data Port has had more readers since joining The Citizen than it had in its other communities.

There are disadvantages, however. Your blog’s appearance is largely out of your hands, constrained as it is by something that roughly resembles a newspaper column or news story.

There is another constraint that’s largely psychological but fairly strong: Once you establish your blog as about some particular topic…politics, dogs, religion, the environment, Hispanic affairs or auto racing…you’ll find it hard to shift gears to something entirely different. You feel that this “something different” is not what your readers want from you.

Two examples: This series, probably; and and an attempt to write a short story in continuing installments. This last seemed so uncomfortable that after a couple of sections I moved it to an alternate Data Port location. No one read it there, either. So, no more short stories.However, you’re stuck with these retrospectives for a while longer.

The one constraint that is significantly lacking is editorial control by Gannett or our editor Mark Evans. So long as you do not utter palpable falsehoods, commit libel or violate copyright you’re good to go. Simple bone-headed errors are cheerfully corrected by our readers.

Next: Writing for Fame and Writing For Money

At the heart of the Taliban’s radical islamism is the merging of the categories of citizen and true believer. The two are so closely identified that political cooperation between Sunni and Shiite is nearly impossible. See Iraq.

This baffles most of us, who can’t understand why the two groups don’t  see their common interest as citizens. The reason is that the independent category of citizen has been absorbed by the category of true believer. No common faith, then no common citizenship. Cooperation between the two groups becomes impossible.

Freedom of religion has always been part of the American social contract. Although we may view the other guy’s religion as contrary or peculiar we tolerate it. We may think it odd but, hey, that’s his thing…even if his ‘religion’ is no religious belief at all.

This tolerance is reinforced by the constitutional rejection of an established national religion. With that rejection comes the primacy of the citizen and, for all its warts and blemishes, an open society.

Men of good faith frequently ‘witness’ their faith by cooperation with other religious groups in humanitarian projects for the general good. Although such acts may have political consequences they are essentially acts of human benevolence and not in and of themselves political acts. Think the Sanctuary movement, or No More Deaths.

But when religious groups indulge in direct political action and move from spreading the Good News to advocating the imposition of  their will on society at large we begin to see the decay of the social contract that makes cooperation in an open society possible.

To advocate the collapse of the distinction between citizen and true believer is a danger to the open society. Is anyone doing that? I’ll let the reader decide:

The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church’s public marks of the covenant–baptism and holy communion–must be denied citizenship.”

“This is God’s world, not Satan’s. Christians are the lawful heirs, not non-Christians.”

Gary North (Institute For Christian Economics)

“When the Christian majority takes over this country, there will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil.”

        Gary Potter, Catholics For Christian Political Action

 

“I don’t know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”       

      George Bush Sr.

“Those who control the access to the minds of children will set the agenda for the future of the nation and the future of the western world.”

“State Universities are breeding grounds, quite literally, for sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV), homosexual behavior, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, alcoholism, and drug abuse.”

James Dobson- Focus on The Family

“We’re fighting against humanism, we’re fighting against liberalism…we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today…our battle is with Satan himself.”

“The Bible is the inerrant … word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.”

“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”

Jerry Falwell

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”

“You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.”

“[Planned Parenthood] is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism – everything that the Bible condemns.”

Pat Robertson (Christian Coalition) 

Quotations sourced from AdultThought, a student, faculty and staff organization at the University of California, San Diego. For more click here.

Cold weather and clean-up sweeps by armored riot police are shifting the Occupy Wall Street movement from literal occupation of public spaces to other forms of political action.

On balance the literal occupation of public space has been successful. The focus of public attention has been shifted from the single issue of national debt to the fact that our financial and political systems have become so dysfunctional  that they are resistant to reform or problem solving.

A commenter to an earlier post observed that the number of people actually in tents was a vanishingly small percentage of the nation’s population. True enough, but immaterial. The same was true of marchers for women’s suffrage, active protestors to the Viet Nam war, Mahatma Gandhi or Rosa Parks.

Those protestors were symptoms of a dis-satisfaction with underlying social and political conditions and they would soon become the centers  for general protest and reform.

It is hard to ignore the fact that OWS quickly spread from coast to coast. The conservative press tried to characterize the occupiers as a kind of children’s crusade aided by drummers, pot smokers and the unwashed. It is certainly true that a majority of the tenters were young…although not all…but there were plenty of older folks on hand, too.

Some conservative pundits are apparently heaving a sigh of relief now that OWS is “dead.” They equate the removal of the physical occupations with a removal of the movement. They are, of course, wrong; and apparently blind and deaf to the impact of the social media.

OWS has simply moved to another level of political action and different bits of real estate. We should expect to see flash mobs, organized protests, marches, and other forms of guerrilla consciousness raising keeping on the pressure for reform.

These actions will be very annoying to the establishment. Good.

Less annoying, and possible more effective, will be a technique borrowed from a more traditional campaign book: The campaign  coffee gatherings in private homes.

Occupy Your Living Room is a way to take part in OWS without camping in the park. Simply invite your friends and neighbors to your home for an “Occupy Coffee.” Explain why you are sympathetic to the movement and be ready to point out facts about the way (for instance) the financial industry, left unsupervised, was responsible for the nation’s economic near collapse.

There’s no telling what you might learn. At a recent social gathering a friend mentioned something that he thought was outrageous: Apparent legal insider trading by members of Congress. It was new to me. Is it new to you?

Have a look.