Welcome Home
I’ve always thought of change in politics as a sort ripple effect: each of us takes a step toward making a change, and that ripples out to others taking the same steps.
Suddenly, you have a wave and enough momentum to crash into the static and hopefully force a change of course.
When I started blogging with Jane back in 2005, it was an outlet for my disgust at media reportage of the Fitzgerald investigation, and a means to stop griping at the teevee and print talking heads and, maybe just maybe, make a difference.
I never considered that this would become a full-time gig.
At the time, The Peanut was tiny and what I needed was an intellectual outlet for all the building political frustrations and disgust at the direction the country was taking in those early days of stay-at-home mom-dom.
Her future was all-important to me then — still is — and I needed a way to make a difference while being able to care for her early needs. Blogging was a great way to put my practical legal knowledge and political obsessions to work for a greater good.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words:
a time comes when silence is betrayal
have always propelled me forward in the face of injustice or wrong. Blogging has been an extension of that need to make things better, one issue at a time.
And look where that got me.
This new blog is an extension of that, allowing me a full-blown outlet for analysis, activism and snarky outrage, and a space to call my own for all the work I want to continue to do.
Legal analysis is my passion, but so is social justice and media analysis, and pretty much all things politics and activism thereon. So, as always, there will be a mix. I’m still highly involved with FDL’s greater work, but now I have a little corner of it to make my own, to tend to the issues that matter most to me and push forward the work on those problems that desperately need it.
In short, to keep doing what I always have, but in a broader space of my own making.
This new space for my activism, analysis and snark would never have come about without the countless hours and efforts of every reader who has picked up the phone, sent out a fax, written a scathing letter to the editor, gone to a public meeting and stood up for justice. All of you keep me moving forward on this path as surely as my need to make things better stokes my enthusiasm, my outrage, and my need for more sunshine.
None of this would have been possible without my serendipitous meeting of Jane, whose enthusiasm for progressive politics and love of snark, and our joint obsession with the early days of Fitz-mania, started these tiny ripples moving all the way back in 2005. Her encouragement from the start propelled me forward to find my own voice. Thanks, Jane.
Welcome to my new home at FDL. I hope we all get to keep making those ripples rise together for all the generations to come.
Nice digs, Redd. Great to see this.