A Tipping Point

I'll be the first person to say that I haven't the foggiest idea about what the 'right' way to blog is. I tend to be somewhat verbose when I write, even when it comes to trying to convey ideas in a pithy sort of way. Well, at this point, this is more for my own benefit, serving as a pressure relief valve of sorts. If you are so inclined to read it, then you do so at your own peril. I couldn't tell you what my own tipping point was for beginning this blog, but I guess I reached the right mental 'PSI'.

Who am I? It's one of those questions that almost defines you by the way you attempt to answer it, even more so than the substance of your response. By what criteria do you choose to define yourself? Well, that says something about who you are, doesn't it?

I suppose that I am something more than I should have been, something less than I could have been, and in between the nadir and the zenith of possibilities, here I am. I see myself when I was 14 years old, most of my life ahead of me. A snot-nosed kid terrified by the world outside of his microscopic sphere of influence. A roiling conflagration of arrogance, prejudice, fear, hormones, and hope. I wonder if I've really changed that much in the last 16 years.

I am a historian (whether by birth, by study, or by habit). And as a historian, I've learned that you have to approach whatever it is you study with a consideration of context, lest you fall into the trap of incorrectly characterizing people or events because of your own shortsightedness. You obviously can't live out the entire life of Adolf Hitler, one day at a time, in order to understand everything that he did. But as you start to collect more and more background data on him (assuming it is factual), the portrait of the man may become clearer for you. At some point, you inevitably apply your own analyses to the data in order to come up with a set of conclusions. I'm sure most people will agree that Adolf Hitler was genocidal. That said, some may identify that with an overbearing sense of nationalism, while others may cite his mental instability. I hope that through this blog you can start to collect some of your own data points about me.