The Speech I Won’t Be Giving This Weekend (Part Four Of Four)

Finishing what I started in the first three posts:

Before getting to the fourth, final, and to me most important tenet of the blogging evangel, indulge me for a minute while I remind you of something I said at the beginning:

We suck.

Seriously.  We absolutely suck.

We suck, because if we didn’t suck we wouldn’t be a marginal, marginalized minority.  We suck, because if our beliefs and philosophies are properly grounded and what we tell is the truth then we should be having an impact in society far beyond the walls of our phonebooth kingdoms.  We suck, because if we didn’t suck we wouldn’t be in this room striving with all our might to convince ourselves and each other everything is all right and we will once again rock you while the Democrats parade around town singing “We Are The Champions.”

Which leads to the fourth tenet of the blogging evangel.

Never become what you profess to oppose.

Never.

When blogging as a forum for political expression first emerged, it was eagerly embraced by conservatives as a vessel with which to counter the liberal bias of traditional media.  Here was the opportunity to, via direct action, establish a model of doing the right thing the right way.  By forsaking the elitist, snobbish and exclusionary mode of traditional media, the opportunity was now available to create a new media, one in which the previously unheard and unnoticed private citizen with something to say could offer news and commentary for consideration by other private citizens without the unspoken censorship of traditional media deciding which voices would be heard and which would be silenced.  There would be a new cooperative, a sharing of ideas and promotion in which all would write and work not for their own gain but on behalf of all for the good of all.  We, you and I together, would forge a covenant with ourselves and our readers; a covenant declaring we would be the antithesis of traditional media’s bigotry toward the principles and values we held to be true.

We lied.

We say we are of and for the people, yet we heartily endorse and promote ourselves as we form cliques the like of which would embarrass the silliest of schoolchildren.  We say we are solely about the message, yet we grovel for every dollar available and whine when they don’t come our way.  We say we are of and for the people, yet we do not speak to each other unless we consider the one attempting communication part of our social strata based on popularity and adherence to the mutual admiration society honor code.  We say we are of and for the people, yet we do not serve the people.  We seek only to be served and reassured that we are who we tell ourselves we are regardless of the evidence provided by our abject failure stating we are anything but who, and what, we pretend to be while admiring ourselves in a lying mirror.

We are what we profess to oppose.

And we wonder why God doesn’t bless us.

God has other plans.

I think of a friend, so burdened with the call to evangelize he has thrown him wholeheartedly into learning the language of another people so he might go to their country and speak to them about the Good News of Jesus Christ.  I think of a friend, one who has given so much in her life she has willingly opened her home to those who had no place to go, now staring into the face of every parent’s worse nightmare as she waits to find out the diagnosis of the lump her daughter found in her breast a few weeks ago.  Yet even with this clawing at her heart, she continues to give.

These are the ones God has blessed.

Meanwhile, we praise and promote Christopher Hitchens, Allahpundit and Charles Johnson.

We behave, in every fashion, in the exact same manner as the ones about who we insist we are the upright alternative.

Therefore, we suck.

And we need to stop.

Now.

Thank you.

Hopefully, next year I won’t have to again write this speech.  But I’m not holding my breath.