Opening post! ...good thing I have no readership to let down. YET.

Well, first post! Aren't you lucky to read this. Welcome, America! Feel free to follow this. I recommend NetNewsWire for following blogs. My good friend Mikey (hi Mikey!) introduced it to me about a year and a half ago, and it has changed my life significantly.

Anyway, I found this neat MLK quote from his Letter from Birmingham County Jail. He wrote the letter from jail in response to an open letter, published by eight white clergy members (Christian and Jewish both) three months earlier, urging him to allow desegregation to be a battle fought in court, not with civil disobedience in the streets. I would encourage you to read the whole letter- it's only a 10 minute read- but I really enjoyed this part. Reverend King is always powerfully eloquent, but this section felt incredibly real to read, and I could feel his frustration, sadness and disappointment.

"I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, 'Wait.' But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness towards white people' when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: 'Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?'; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored'; when your first name becomes 'nigger' and your middle name becomes 'boy' (however old you are) and your last name becomes 'John,' and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title 'Mrs.'; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness'; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."

Sorry this isn't the most fascinating first post, but as I promised, I will be consistently linking to and quoting from persons infinitely more smarter and interesting than I am. Get ready for a whirlwind, people, because there are a lot of those.

I know some people are into focused blogs, but my brain is too scattered for that. If I don't drop this in about a second, I'll probably have posts on all different kinds of things. Skip anything you're not interested in- I won't be offended, and even if I would be, I can't tell! Life is grand.