Outing my inner pariah

I started emailing links. After that it was just a matter of time until I became a blogger. My son first suggested I blog, and the final impetus was signing a pork-busting petition--you had to be a blogger.

That was in January 2006. Initially I wrote for family and my right-wing conspiratorial women friends. It was easier than a newsletter and more timely. When I was a kid my mom, who'd been a journalist, had a big bulletin board in the hall full of clipped newspaper articles. For my kids I put articles on the kitchen table, eventually emailing them. Now that I have a blog, I'll probably be posting in perpetuity.

The other impetus was local, both in the village and the city of Chicago. I regularly got mad at the coverage or lack of it in the MSM Chicago papers. The local suburban news sheets were essentially real estate rags, and often you would only find out what was going on in town by reading the letters to the editor. When I wrote my own, sometimes they would be published, sometimes not, and if they were sometimes they were grossly edited--because to be a conservative on the north shore of Chicago was to be counter-cultural. Being a conservative was something to be spoken of in hushed tones in polite company, if at all. Being a conservative was to be despised.

I wasn't always a conservative. I was raised a Democrat. But after a while I didn't believe in Democrat solutions, because they never seemed to want to solve problems, just complain about them, throw money at them, and then complain again when whatever they tried didn't work. Meanwhile taxes always went up, along with societal ills, and our weak foreign policy invited murderous adventurism by the evil dictator of the day. I was schooled well by Jimmy Carter, the last Democrat I voted for, and became a Reaganite.

After a while I got tired of pretending not to be a pariah in my PC community. I decided to embrace my inner pariah. I became a conservative blogger, and I revel in being irreverent.

I got a whiff of eminent domain in town and blogged about that. Driving out family businesses to create some Disney-esque downtown with taxpayer subsidies seemed unrealistic and expensive to me. I was still mad about their dumbing down the academics of our elementary schools, especially math, while the schools spent money hand over fist on buildings and technology. Then there was the time the village board signed on to the Kyoto treaty--foreign policy--let's run the world while the sewers and streets needed repair. That cost two board members reelection. And if any liberals think that approving Kyoto was OK locally imagine if you were in the minority and your village declared war. Local politics is fraught enough without taking on world issues of GREAT IMPORT, especially when just asking questions in a public forum may be viewed by some on either side as beyond the pale.

At any rate, I turned to blogging so as not to bore my family, nor alienate my liberal women friends with conversation political, and along the way I made some new friends. At least I entertain myself. And Obama is from Chicago, so he and Michelle are a hot topic for me.

While I missed meeting up for my first BlogHer convention, I hope to go next year. And yes, I was at another conflicting convention--not Kos, but the conservative alternative, where I met more than a few notable women bloggers. (Women are much in demand this year.)

I am not alone any more:) (eeek)

--crossposted at BlogHer