Blogging for me began back in 2002. I occupied a cubicle in a soul-sucking job for a major disability insurer. Every minute I spent there was a minute I’d never recover. Fortunately, I didn’t invest  much energy into furthering Whitey’s corporate agenda and instead began planning my plan of exit.

A co-worker with topnotch design skills built a functional website at my behest. He never charged me a penny, either. The most important element of the site was that it including a blogging platform. As a writer looking to up my game and work on my craft, I was off to the races with a space to publish my own writing.

Since 2003, I’ve had several blogs including this one. My writing has been bylined in a host of print publications and online. I’ve hit the markers I set out for nearly 20 years ago.

Occasionally, I look back at something I wrote. The blog I maintained from 2004 until I launched this one in 2012, Words Matter, is still out there. Since I just completed rereading George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, I was curious about what I might have picked up previously and perhaps noted somewhere.

Interestingly, these prior blog posts serve as a “trail of breadcrumbs” back to what I was thinking at the time. Just like in the present, I was concerned about the use of fear and hysteria (back in 2006) and also, the limbing of what is considered “proper” in what we are allowed to think and say. These are both central tenets to Orwell’s book that I’m amazed was written in 1949 and is still eerily relevant—just as if he’d written it last week.

In my blog post from 2006 at the Words Matter blog, I wrote this about fear:

Yesterday, while driving home from some appointments in Dover-Foxcroft, I was scanning the radio dial for something tolerable, or at least wouldn’t put me to sleep. For a five minute period, my better judgment took leave and I found myself listening to the demagoguery of Sean Hannity, during his afternoon exercise in right wing ideological indoctrination. This man is certifiably insane. His propaganda-laced tirades are lapped up eagerly by his brain-addled listeners, who subscribe to this kind of bigotry-infused and racist rhetoric. He was prattling on about the need for the U.S. to support their friends (in this case, Israel) in the battle against “Islamofascism,” a term invented by the haters on the right.

Fourteen years later, I could rewrite this, change a few names and terms and it would read this way to detail something that happened to me back in April. I haven’t looked back: Continue reading →