Look out beyond the walls of Babylon
How long can their needs go unfilled?
So begins Jackson Browne's 1976 album "The Pretender," an intensely intimate work about the death of Browne's wife, Phyllis. Even as he sets out to grieve a loss of impossible personal magnitude, Browne observes that the suffering within the Babylon he inhabits is only a minute pang in comparison with the starvation that exists outside of it.
It's a sentiment I've often felt: my troubles, though they might sometimes appear insurmountable, are in fact inconsequential. I remain locked tight within Babylon, be that an allegory for my family, my country, or my own head.
This blog, should it survive, is about escaping Babylon and addressing those who starve still.
This isn't my first foray into "new media." I began a Twitter feed earlier this year, and I quickly found that I couldn't maintain it. This blog will likely meet the same end. It seems worth pursuing, however, because I've found similar fora useful for the organization of my thoughts (you can peruse my collection of musings at cross-x.com, if you'd like).
The topics discussed here will be dictated by current events and the thoughts that ferment within my own brain. Should this publication mature beyond the age of a few posts, I will certainly discuss the issues of greatest importance to my identity and of greatest interest to me. Those include:
- My Catholicism, and what social role it prescribes;
- Latin America, and what may happen to it;
- My ambiguous Hispanic heritage, and whether it matters;
- Development, what it means, and whether it ought be pursued;
- Representative democracy, and whether it is sufficient as a form of governance;
- Neoliberalism, and how deep its failures run;
- My personal inadequacy to write on any of the previous three subjects, and whether this blog is useful to anyone other than me;
- Colorado, and its unequivocal beauty.
Enjoy, and please comment. I'm thrilled that you've read even this much.
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