Personality as a Casualty of War

Posted on April 16, 2003 in Blogging

I’ve been looking over my blog for the last few weeks, particularly at my struggles to remember that I have a life that isn’t at all related to the war and my thoughts on that. And I’ve been comparing what I’ve observed in myself with what I have seen elsewhere.

It seems tragic to me that some people have written blogs which are full of information about things that they’ve read elsewhere on the net or seen on television without mentioning at all the context in which these observations are made. It’s like we’re all envious of the possibly dead Raed and Christopher, both of whom are living the life of adventure and so we try to mimic them by regurgitating what we see on television or what we read in the papers or online.

The terrible loss is that we don’t know most of these people are people. They write like press wires, with the occasional wise crack. There’s nothing expressed through their eyes, their noses, their ears, their fingertips or their tongues. It’s dead stuff, lifeless, removed, experience that isn’t experience at all.

There’s too much control over our passions in most of it, too little introspection or original thought. And a lot of backslapping for saying what every other blogger is saying, as every other blogger says it.