19 July 2010
Yesterday marked a special anniversary for Common American Journal. On 18 July 2009 our first entry (about a water rights bill) was posted.
The Journal is a very small, obscure news and opinion aggregate as blogs go, but we’ve welcomed nearly 46,000 visitors in this first year. We’re very grateful to everyone who has stopped by our site and sent their messages of support and encouragement to the Wordboss.
Common American Journal was born of the frustration of feeling we had no voice. A couple of us belonged to various conservative/libertarian email lists and soon realized that our input wasn’t welcomed by the list owner in one instance, or by some of the members of another list. At the time of the “green movement” in Iran last June, when the elections were thwarted and massive protests began, we wrote frequent updates about what was happening there, based upon eyewitness accounts from people in Iran writing on Twitter. This was news the networks and most cable outlets were not reporting. One list member, someone who worked in education, confronted us asking, “Why are we writing about elections in Iran on this list? What is the point of this?!” We had to explain the possibilities for freedom in Iran had President Obama offered some token of support to the young population who risked their lives to protest against their government. It was a most enlightening moment in so many, many ways. A few days of soul-searching brought us to the conclusion that a blog was the vehicle we were looking for. We would no longer risk alienating friends by overwhelming them with unwanted emails full of our news “finds,” and we would be able to withdraw from the political lists, too.
So we began reading, researching, and posting. We feel our nation is heading down the wrong path and is perilously close to losing most or all of its cherished liberty. With information comes the potential power of informed choices. If we’ve been able to arm visitors with some small pieces of information, or have pointed the way to the really informed, clear conservative and libertarian voices on the internet, then we’ve accomplished what we set out to do.
Now we head into year two. America’s freedom and future hangs in the balance and a nation is awakening to the range of possibilities–from nightmares to dreams and visions.
It’s time for all of us to get to work.
