While the blog celebrated its first blogiversary over a month ago, today marks my blogiversary. Shortly after I e-mailed Bruce (whom I then only knew as “GayPatriot) to praise him for telling Log Cabin to stick it (for withholding its endorsement of the president in last fall’s campaign), we exchanged e-mails and soon he invited me on board.

Bruce, I am grateful for the opportunity you gave me to share my thoughts with your audience, pretty substantial even back then for a blog so young.

Since then, we have gotten to know each other and frequently found it uncanny how similar our thoughts are on certain issues. And I met Bruce and his Partner John last fall when they were in LA. We made a pilgrimage to one of the most sacred spots in Southern California–the Reagan Library.

I am also grateful to those of you who read us regularly and those who comment, particularly those who take the time to express their disagreement in a civil manner. While I know (and regret) that some critics misrepresent our ideas and call us (and our supporters names), I appreciate those like Patrick who help further the kind of debate, I believe, a blog should promote.

As I am busy writing two papers and engaging in introspection appropriate to the Days of Awe, I will not be able to post much in the next few days. I’ll try to dash off a thought or two. So, as I did when I celebrated my six-month blogiversary, I reference my “virgin post” and quote again the words of the great Albert Camus with which I entered the blogosphere:

Something in us has been destroyed by the spectacle of the years just past. And this something is the eternal confidence of man, which has always made him believe that one could draw human reactions from another man by speaking to him in the language of humanity. We have seen lying, debasing, killing, deportations, torture, and each time it was not possible to persuade those who were doing it not to do it, because they were so sure of themselves and because one cannot persuade an abstraction, that is to say, the representative of an ideology.

The long conversation of mankind has just ended. And, of course, a man whom one cannot persuade is a man who frightens us….

We live in terror because persuasion is no longer possible, because man has been delivered entirely to history and because he can no longer turn to that part of himself, as true as the historical part, which he discovers in front of the beauty of the world and of human faces…

“The Century of Fear” from Combat, November 1946 (my translation). If I have a personal motto as a blogger, it is those words.

I seek always to remain open to persuasion and to keep open as well that long conversation which too many, on both sides of the political aisle, would rather keep closed.

-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com