Blogging for B&N

I've posted to various blogs over the years. Recently, Barnes & Noble asked me to write a post about the move from physical to digital books.

Here is the result.

The best part about blogging is when you get comments. In that spirit, I want to thank those who comment at this blog. This is, of course, a relatively obscure blog, with somewhere around 50-100 visitors a day.

B&N, by contrast, is obviously a major platform, and therefore dozens of people posted comments behind my piece there.

Please visit the link, and if you so choose, add a comment!

Thanks.

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If Loneliness is Contagious, So is Hope

Wow, I've let almost an entire workweek get away from me without posting here -- my bad.

I have spent a bunch of that week downtown, attending a conference and meeting with more promising media startups.

Although this is the worst of times to be a professional journalist (we're all out of work), it's a fascinating time from the perspective of changing communication habits.

Take blogs. A decade ago, hardly anyone was blogging.

Today, millions of people blog. It's become a major way of connecting with one another in an otherwise fragmenting world.

According to a report in the Washington Post recently, loneliness is contagious.

That caught my eye, because I've often noticed the effects, some of them quite subtle, people's emotional states have on each other. The studies in the report covered by the Post indicate that one person's loneliness can be transmitted to others via a variety of pathways.

At the core of our humanity is our capacity for empathy. Just sensing the deep loneliness another feels triggers a response inside many of us. We can so easily imagine feeling the same way, and sometimes, of course, we do.

Isolation, alienation, loneliness -- these are major social diseases of modern society. To address them, there is another tool within our grasp and that is hopefulness, optimism.

I observe that expressing one's essential hopefulness if contagious as well. Some may dismiss you as lacking the appropriate degree of cynical realism about our actual condition if you act hopeful, but others will thank you for making their day a little brighter.

With that in mind, I'll try to end this post, on a cold winter's day, with few tangible amenities available to view, on a hopeful note. Things may get worse, it's true; yet they may get better.

I'm opting for the latter view...

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As a Decade Ends

Remember the fears over the Y2K?

That is how this decade started out. I was living in Takoma Park, Md., at the time, and I remember purposefully filling my car with gas before driving the family over to my sister's house in Vienna, Va., early on New Year's Eve night, 1999.

Rumors and reports of impending disaster had been circulating for months, and those given to apocalyptic visions were hunkered down, awaiting the inevitable.

But it never happened.

Having quite a few engineer friends, I considered the prospect of a global Internet failure remote, but I filled up that car anyway, just in case.

Where exactly I was thinking of taking my young family to escape whatever horrors might have ensued a Y2K disaster now eludes my faltering memory. Probably getting to my sister's house was as safe a haven as I could have imagined.

After all, thanks to my nephew, they had the best toy gun arsenal I had witnessed up until that time.

***

It's good to be able to sit up and walk around tonight, after a pinched nerve laid me low over the weekend, after our 1,000+ road trip through Arizona last week.

But I'm blessed by a body that (still) recovers quickly, and by tomorrow sometime, I should be back to normal.

***

A much more shocking event than any Y2K scenario awaited America as the decade, century and millenium pivoted, of course, and that was to occur on September 11th, 2001.

The Bush administration had every piece of information it needed to have to be able to recognize the magnitude of the threat from al-Qaeda, but the record shows they ignored all of it.

Nevertheless, once hit, this country came together and started striking back.

That is the problem. We reacted like the hurt monster we, in fact, were, and still are. We struck out at the people we perceived as our enemies.

Eight years later, tomorrow night President Obama will announce a troop "surge" of 30,000 young men and women who will lay their lives on the line in Afghanistan.

Remember, I know Afghanistan.

I'll listen to his arguments, but for me, and for many others, he has a skeptical audience to convince this is the wisest course at this point in our troubled history.

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500 Miles Away From Home (Sacred Ground)

There is something about a road trip that reveals the deepest truths about this country, as wandering minstrels, poets, and ordinary folks have been saying for as long as we've been here.

Here is my best friend trying to copy a cactus that is probably twice as old as she is, because this particular species doesn't develop "arms" until it's been around for at least 75 years, according to my big sister.

America is a huge country. Once you hit the road, you can drive forever, it seems. You'll encounter all sorts of options along the way, one of which, in the West, includes Indian reservations.

On this trip, I've been reading Antonio D'Ambrosio's intriguing book, "A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears. This is the story of Cash's passionate attempt to illuminate the plight of American Indians; an attempt that was suppressed by the music industry.

We European settlers don't really like to be reminded of what our predecessors did to the native people who were here when they arrived. We also would prefer to forget what was done to non-white immigrants -- Asians and Latinos -- who came here for the same reasons we did. A generation ago, the lovely person sitting next to me in our car would have been sent to a concentration camp.

The only way to interpret the great folk song, "This Land is Your Land" is that it was meant for all of us, not a privileged few. The indigenous cultures that existed here for millenia before the invaders arrived don't believe in the concept of individual ownership of land anyway. You cannot own Mother Earth.

But you can be good custodian, preserving what you find for future generations.

The only items we bought on this trip were from Native American stores, where the proceeds go to natives. As we move along the great highways in the West, we know we are cutting through sacred ground.

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