Two Thousand

Earlier this month, we passed the fifth anniversary of the founding of this blog. Within the next day or two, we'll reach 216,000 unique hits.

And this is the 2,000th post to this blog.

I'm very proud of what I've achieved with this blog, but that's not to say that anyone should be especially impressed.

With this blog, as I said in my initial post, I set out to place my ideas and my remarks into the marketplace of ideas. I set out to compete with professional pundits and journalists, to bear witness to my opinions, to put forward and defend ideas, and to have an outlet for my reactions to the world around me. And I have done so.

You may not have known this, but in the years leading up to the American revolution, many, many American colonists took up a new pasttime. They began keeping diaries and journals. They wrote, often for no audience at all, of the great issues of their day, and how those issues affected themselves, their families, and their communities.

Did they, as has been suggested, somehow sense the momentous events that were soon to take place in America? Was this foreknowledge of what was to come the thing which impelled them to record for posterity their own perspectives on history as it unfolded around them?

Or, as I now begin to think, could it be that it was the fact itself of their becoming diarists that spurred in them the habit of reflection on the world around them, and that provided them the insights and the motivations to attempt to influence the world?

In the last several years, literally millions of people have taken up blogging and similar on-line activities. What will be the long-term effect of so many people taking an increased interest in the doings of their communities, their states, their nation, and their government? It's impossible to say what will ultimately be the result; there are many possibilities. But the least likely outcome of all is that, with all the increased levels of attention being paid and information being available, nothing will change.

It pleases me to be part of this tide of history. I pray that God will bring about a positive result.