The Frustrated Americans

Like my friend Paul, I am somewhat new to the world of blogging and I expect to have quite the learning curve. I share his feelings in many areas, especially that of frustration with Facebook as a place for meaningful discussion on anything of substance, especially when it comes to politics.

I will follow Paul’s example with a bit of an introduction. I grew up in Boaz, Alabama. I graduated from Jacksonville State University in 1990 with a degree in Music Education, followed almost immediately by spending the next year and a half  or so doing various things for the United States Army, nine months of which were spent in various exotic locations in the Middle East (the careful reader should take note – if you are not fond of sarcasm, my blog may not be your favorite). After returning home from that service, I continued my education at JSU, stopping just a few classes short of my Master’s in Music Education to take a job as a band director. Over the next decade, I finished my Master’s, decided teaching was not for me, moved more times than I care to remember, taught again, stopped teaching again, tried other things, taught again in another state, walked out of it for good with one ridiculous statement from a principal, and became proficient in the art of the run-on sentence. I currently work for one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S. As A (see what I did there?) claims adjuster. I’m the guy you call when bad things have happened. I’m a guy with a lot of interests, and I hope a lot of interesting stories.

Like Paul, I’m a bit of a round peg/square hole guy politically speaking. I am very Liberty-minded, which by definition means I simply cannot support the Democratic party. It also means I simply cannot abide by the Republican party’s lip service to smaller government while doing less than nothing to actually implement it. The Libertarian party is appealing, but has yet to gather enough traction to attract either meaningful voter support or strong candidates with enough name recognition.

This blog was conceptualized and created in a short amount of time. I have a private social media page which I created some time ago as a place where I could post the ocassional rant, or items which may be a bit on the salty side without offending some of my more genteel friends or suffering the onslaught of the oh so tolerant left. Paul is an active participant on that page. He posted one day with an expression of dissatisfaction with that form of media, stating he was thinking of blogging, and asked to know our thoughts. That resulted in a message to both myself and Paul from a common friend, a brilliant computer/IT/internet professional, offering to set us up a blog. We chatted a bit about our thoughts of what we wanted to do, and discovered a remarkably common vision. Paul had the idea. I came up with the name. Our common friend (I’ll leave it to him to introduce himself), the real brain of the operation, corralled enough spare electrons from his world to make this website a reality.

I hope this to be a place where we can discuss things we feel to be important with an aim toward logic and reason. I feel those qualities to be almost absent from most public discussion. I ask you to join us in the same spirit. I expect limited feeding of trolls here, but I certainly do not want this to be an echo chamber. I appreciate substance far more than symbolism, and I certainly hope to learn.

Thank you for reading, and please share your thoughts!