The original concept for this site came in the about a year ago (the winter-spring of 2034) when I was laid up with a broken shoulder and a touch of spinal stenosis. Around that time, I also felt I needed an outlet to discuss the state of our country and world because the weight of the situation was building up in my head. So I started this site, and wrote a few things, but then I shelved it for about a year. I wasn’t sure that I had a good grasp of an original concept.

There were then and continue to be, dozens or hundreds or thousands of voices from all vantage points, contributing to the cacophony of a world on edge. Some of those voices are very noisy and bombastic and some are deep, cerebral and almost obscure. A few voices are close to the source and generate breaking news while most just regurgitate reports that come in via other sources. So with all those voices, was there any place at all for one more?

In a discussion, I hit on a possible concept and married it with some other things that I have done before with some success. There are at least 3 components of this concept: 1) I live on a street in a quiet neighborhood in a fairly large city, in America. My conversation partner posed this question, one afternoon: What can we do from there—one little house nestled in a quiet the corner of the world? And I said that we could tell people—both fellow Americans, and people from other nations—what it is like to live in this period. Just what does the world look like outside of our window.

There is some precedence for this first point. I once wrote a couple of blogs where I was reporting from a couple of federal trials, and had some success with this. My reports let people know what it is like to be inside the courtroom on any day, and these reports will likewise convey a since of what it is like to be an American when the firm lines that have etched and shaped our country seem a little blurry; 2) In another project, I was once did web work for some guy who employed my late wife. He had her running a retail business that had a White House theme. So I would write things about the country and its history for the website. Around this time, there was the election contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Gore won the popular vote but Bush won the election (in looking back, these seem like simple pastoral times by comparison to the present climate) Since I was running this web site that had much to do with the history and traditions of America, I would occasionally get notes from people in foreign lands. There was some confusion. They had learned about American Democracy, and the principle of free elections. The person who wins the vote, wis the election right? That didn’t happen in that election, and these people were wondering why. So I wrote some articles about the electoral college and the nuances of our system, so they might better understand.

If people in foreign lands were confused then, I am pretty sure many of them are more than a little confused now.

So I write this for them, for us, for me.