Every website needs a statement of purpose. Every act of resistance needs a glimpse of intentional clarity, if only for the ones involved.
I needed a place to rail into the void.
I needed to have some kind of voice.
After all, everyone should have voice.
Everyone.
Especially in these times of too many voices being silenced.
The morning that I wrote these words I was walking through downtown Edmonton. Handwritten in black felt pen onto the outer wall of a Jasper Avenue office tower was a screed, a rambling essay denouncing something or other to do with the government, society and beyond. I did not stop to absorb the message… but it was there. Did the person who wrote it deserve to have a voice? Of course, though maybe the medium was neither conventional nor attuned towards an audience in a meaningful way.
But to be fair, are any of us doing anything foundationally different than such sharpie-ink rantings penned on the fascia of corporate real estate? I suggest not. Angry videographers, political influencers, shit posting trolls, or upvoting mods, all are screeds of one sort or another.
Obviously, such displays are but one extreme of claiming one’s right to have a voice. And inking on an urban wall would probably not be my choice.
Instead I am starting a website.
Why not go on Youtube? You ask. What about Twitter or Facebook? Reach would be greater. Algorithms might boost you higher and louder.
Well, one could argue the plausible position of ownership: just as the owners of the building are entitled to wash off the felt pen ramblings from their business tower if they happen to disagree with the format or the content, so are the owners of the countless corporate social media platforms entitled to do with content they may disagree with. Again, on the morning I wrote this, Tiktok’s new MAGA-leaning owners were actively censoring voices for disagreeing with the US government. Tomorrow it will be a different platform. Thus far the censorship has been nudged with quiet impunity, quiet deletions, but like as not the day is inevitably due when such bleaching of voices is as open and obvious as the soap and brushes will be to clean that wall.
We all need a voice and particularly more so in these times of dark history when voices are vital to resist the wrongdoing of those who are in positions of power.
The choice is to scream into those voids in the way that does not have your voice silenced, or to take your voice elsewhere.
I choose one I control.
But why resist at all? Why stand up for your beliefs? Why plant a flag in the sand and declare you will go no further than this?
I will certainly write with frequency herein about my upbringing in the soft cult of a prairie-bound evangelical church, but among many shortcomings of such a childhood were the absolutes of compliance to someone else’s rules. It is such a deeply foundational aspect of my personal existence that I find I need to exert effort simply to stop from looking over my shoulder that those promised demons are not lurking ready and waiting to break me. My parents were they inclined to read these screeds I am planning to pen on this site would front a resistance of their own, objecting to my characterization of my youth in a middlingly terrible church community that policed thought and action and life. Experience, however, beats perception and mine was clearly once locked in an invisible cage of compliance with authority, right or wrong.
Resistance and voice, I have learned in my many decades here, are more than anything never offered freely. No authority will give permission to resist, and no owner of a platform, be that a social media feed or a blank wall, will offer a voice without forcing a compromise to their goals.
This is my voice. It is small, but it is mine.