Its a question I’ve asked myself over and over as I once again try to figure out how to change the dynamic on the ground here in Mobile, AL where I live. I’ve been a blogger here since 2005, but the task of keeping up with my own diaries was cut short by a severe financial situation that left me trying to find other ways to make a difference here in Mobile, and in some ways I accomplished that.
It’s amazing to see that when I logged back in there are almost 40 diaries that I wrote and never published because the financial stressors on me were so severe that I just couldn’t keep up. And the time I did actually develop a few diaries that got noticed meant that my children and friends couldn’t find me or get in touch with me because I was frantically trying to answer comments and the younger generation were on FB saying “What’s going on with Mom?” or something like that.
So I stepped away but I’ve never found another site or platform that suited me like this one does. Because it’s strengths are the effective monitoring of the communication to make sure people are honoring and respecting each other — a situation seriously lacking in as divided an area as the deep south can be.
And of course, I had to be the one to come up with the name AlabamaLiberal!
I’ve even tried to leave it behind, but that would mean leaving all the friends and conversations we’ve already had. I’ve decided to come back and make it my mission, I hope, to gather a group of friends and writers around me that I know already from other platforms and from the community and try to help steer the dialogue away from the nonsense and vitriol that we keep seeing.
And look, I admit I do try to play with folks expectations sometimes. — Using words that make people do a double take is sort of my specialty.
As a lifetime learner, I’ve spent most of my life playing catchup to the mistakes I made in the late 60’s and didn’t finish my college education until I was 53, and then amassed three degrees and over $230,000 in inflated student loans, which of course i couldn’t pay back because there’s no way the paintings and writing I was doing would be enough to sustain me. And then the economy fell apart, and I gave up trying to paint and just tried to live on Social Security and get to know my sons and their families.
It was rough. And once I tried to do a go fund me, but my life fell apart before it even got off the ground. I haven’t even had a decent computer since then, and that’s something I really used to spend lots of resources on. This is a Chromebook borrowed from the library.
But in other ways, I feel like the past six years have been preparing me to come back strong as a voice that says Alabama does matter and you need to know why.
So today I created another GoFundMe — and I need for you guys to drop in and let people know that what I have to say matters. I’ve always known my art was important, but I’ve struggled to write coherently when there’s emotion involved. And living in Alabama with the idiots that are currently running the damn place creates a lot of damn emotion!
The media landscape has changed drastically from the days when I first held a MoveOn meeting in my house on Old Shell Road and set up a TV to watch Al Gore explain Global Warming, or hung speakers out the window to allow people to listen to Rachel Maddow and Al Franken, or wore shirts with the Democratic political candidate and messages of resistance ironed into my shirts. Back then it was tough to even be a supporter of the University of South Alabama rather than the binary choice of Auburn or Alabama, just like it was in so many other areas of the culture — the us or them, with us or against us dynamic that this site so effectively works to break up into more nuanced and fruitful dialogue.
Yet for many, the media landscape is still the problem. The media has just changed from the radio in the car to the speaker on our cell phone and the message is still in many ways a singular source — a one size fits all — everyone has to have the latest, greatest and most expensive —
and I’m convinced now that the distractions of the current media tools are the most dangerous weapons against a fully functional society that we have ever seen. The constantly changing media environment has cost lives in real ways — from misinformation causing mistaken identity to misuse of data to intentionally or unintentionally harm others.
I want to stay here through the next election cycle to try to help the wider world understand what I’m seeing here on the ground in Alabama. But I want to do that fully connected to DailyKos and its brilliant and diverse community of readers, because without that ability to observe, write and then publish my thoughts, I’m just whistling past the graveyard and not truly living the live I want to live.
So GoFundMe...please...every dollar will help. gofund.me/...