First Things...

I think I need to give up the Drudge Report for a while.

I like the links to various columnists but the whole site is turning in to an online version of the National Enquirer. I suppose that's what happens when you turn your web site into a business. You have to find and attract customers and so you mix up a little hard news with a little wierd stuff to make it happen.

It's sad but true. Being a journalist in the major or mainstream media doesn't mean you're any brighter or more enlightened than others (although sometimes they like to think so). It basically means you look good for whatever group the consultants say must be attracted and can read well. But actual expertise is not necessarily required. This is very true in religion coverage where reporters with college degrees and time and money on their hands still consistently make errors of the most basic kind.

Many bloggers are actual experts in a particular field or have an ability to gather information and learn that puts the make up encrusted TV types to shame. The big guys like to derisively paint a picture of some of the these folks as sitting in rooms with the shades drawn in paranoid delusion hammering out feverish column inches wearing tin foil hats. But often that's just about fear of not being the great OZ of information pulling levers behind the scene to inform the hapless masses. For years no one caiught the condescension that dripped down on us every time Walter Cronkite closed his newscast with "And that's the way it is..." because there were no alternatives. Now there are and OZ is not happy especially when people expose them clumsily trying to manipulate reality in a way they routinely took for granted in the years past.

So the www and blogs are a form of media democracy where voices that don't fit the narrow vision of larger, more established, media (or state controlled media) are made available to the public. The lady on the TV is now only as important a transmitter of news as she can prove herself to be and it may be that the voice of some person in a far away land actually has something more important to say and now finally has a chance.

The problem, of course, is that there really are people wearing tin foil hats typing out feverish column inches out there and active on the web. And people with axes to grind, deviancies to advance, or just snake oil salesmen out to make a buck are lurking in the hidden corners of the internet. Their very anonymity allows them to purge themselves in a public sphere with little consequence.

So reader beware! You may think something is the way it is rooted only in how it plays on Google without remembering that Google can be manipulated by the skilled for their own ends. Behind that nice page layout can be a person barking mad or just trying to make you panic for their own ends.

When I started this blog I had a purpose. Tired of the endless reporting of scandals, the half truths, the revenge seekers, the manipulators and the just plain wierd I thought it might be nice to have a blog that pointed to solutions other than the usual "give me money or power and everything will be alright." I believed then and still do that the core answer to the human dilemma is a matter of basic alignment. Human beings, myself included, have aligned their lives to things that cannot heal, cannot make whole, and cannot satisfy. We need a teacher to help us, a savior to rescue us, and hope to enlighten us and all can be found in Jesus Christ.

I've never been under the illusion that the Church, or more specifically the people within Her, have always been the best, the brightest, or lived Her greatest ideals. I haven't and the older I get the more I see how hard it can be sometimes to live the Christian faith. But that being said the ideals still matter, they're still worth the struggle, they still are the hope of the world. When I stand before people and serve the Liturgy or preach the Word I stand not as some perfect example of my own teaching but as someone who has fallen often yet still believes and tries to transcend my own limited understandings of things by seeking the life that is found in Christ.

If you see this in my blog I'm doing my job.