If you’ve hung out here for a long time, you know that I have some issues with “how are my stats?” I don’t think of that as a laudable thing, I really shouldn’t care. Blogs are supposed to be about what interests us, and damn anyone who doesn’t care.
Yet, for a good long while, things have been going rather swimmingly, as blogging goes that is. Numbers were running up at a slow but steady pace. I didn’t bother to even check even weekly some times. I felt things were catching on.
Suddenly a couple of weeks ago, the bottom fell out. I mean by three-quarters. I am at a loss.
I blog out of a desire to be heard, and thus, this is troubling. Added to the seemingly interminable set of personal mini tragedies that appear to be our stock in life here in the meadow, my one bright ray of sunshine has turned cloudy.
And yet, I was reading a sermon of Paul Tillich‘s today, and found some comfort. He was talking about Isaiah 6. Isaiah has found himself in the presence of God and feels utterly unworthy. Moreover, when he asks how long before God comes to the assistance of Israel, God replies, after all is in total destruction.
Tillich points out that prophets are a dime a dozen. People will always raise prophets who speak to them of their own goodness and worthiness and they will listen to them. Those who prophesy doom and disaster find few listeners.
It has been apparent to me for a long time that I preach to the choir. We all do. For it is natural that we read blogs that say something we want to hear, or that agree, at least in principle with our own philosophies and ways of seeing the world.
This means that I, nor most bloggers convince anyone of anything. And that pains me at least. It seems for naught to do this, yet, I feel, still compelled to write.
Yesterday I listened, to a twit called Louis Gommer, a thoroughly idiotic man elected from the great state of Texas to represent them in Congress. Why I have no idea. He is but another in a long list of those GOPers who have drunk the Kool-aid.” He drivels on about “terrorist babies.”
Harry Reid, so scared he wears a diaper, sides with the hate-mongers and opposes the Islamic Center in NYC.
There is not enough time in a day to remark and castigate all the wrong thinking crazies who populate America today.
It seems tiresome to continue at times. I wonder why I bother. I wonder why any of us bothers.
Yet, Tillich says that we prophets of doom who urge repentance must fulfill our destinies. It is not our assessment of the world that we preach. It is the rational, Yes even a God-given assessment of a world groaning in agony. The world is under attack from every quarter.
We are attacked as Utopian pie-in-the-sky nuts. We are vilified and made fun of. We are ignored in favor of “tell ’em what they wanna hear” demagogues.
And so we continue, or at least I do. Finding in the doing, I suspect at least some relief from the anger, frustration and pain of feeling like you are talking to the wind.
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Existential Ennui 