WHO AM I?

Perhaps the best answer I can offer is to bid you look around my wee creation and discover for yourself.  I've put a lot of myself into it, after all, so you'll find "the real me" almost everywhere here.  The more you look, the clearer the picture will become.

Answers to some fairly standard questions, however, appear in the STATISTICS and PROFILE below, and my VISION may give you some idea of those things I consider most important.

STATISTICS

When I started this website, I was a middle-sized, middle-income, middle-aged census statistic.  I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio (yes, that seething cauldron of mediocrity) a little before the middle of the 20th Century.  I live in a middle-sized house in a middle-sized Midwestern town—Middletown—with my wife and cat, my daughter having recently acquired a husband and a home of her own.

Obvious champion of moderation that I am, one of my few concessions to the Great American Ideal of bigness is that I was employed by a large company—Ameritech—in nearby Centerville (no, I'm not making this up), as a Telecommunications Specialist (whatever that is) for nearly thirty years.  Fortunately, this awkward situation was finally remedied by my retirement.

Subsequently, I decided to make some constructive use of my leisure by going back to university.  My curriculum is all over the map—world history, arts, economics, languages, math, religion, natural sciences, social sciences, computer science, writing, and philosophy.  I'm tired of being a specialist.  Now I'm shooting for something out of the ordinary: "Renaissance Man."  (And I guess by now we can strike the "middle-aged" descriptor, too.)

Personally, I'm a genial curmudgeon, an outgoing introvert, a traditional iconoclast, a religious skeptic—in short, a walking contradiction in terms.  Politically, I'm what might be called (in this strange era, in which new-age anarchists and old-time reactionaries often find themselves on the same side of the fence) a wild-eyed moderate.  I'm a child of an age when such notions as keeping poisonous crud out of the air and ensuring equal opportunity for people of all ethnic and religious groups were just catching on in many parts of the United States.  Individual liberty, health, and justice seemed like pretty good ideas back then.  Despite some excesses and miscues, they still do, as far as some of us are concerned.

VISION

Ever the optimist, I'm still hopeful that the rightward lurch of the American political system in 1980 was merely an aberration, and that saner days lie ahead.  For if that hope is false, it seems inevitable that the United States will revert to an agrarian economy over the next several decades, as deteriorating general education and increasing pressure to conform dull the innovative edge enjoyed by previous generations of American leaders and workers.  Just as anti-intellectual pressures have stifled creativity and fostered oppression in so many other lands, so the current anti-intellectual tide in America will, if unopposed, erode our nation's ability to compete in manufacturing, technology, and finance.  Eventually we'll surrender our long dominance in those lucrative fields (just as we've already ceded our erstwhile preeminence in public health) to those countries that still value education, science, culture, and health as national priorities.

Perhaps, if enough of us care, America will recognize the peril of its present course, and return to the relatively rational and progressive principles which first propelled it to prominence as the most prosperous and free nation in history.  If it does not, we can only hope that those nations which inherit the responsibility of world leadership from us are prepared to exercise it more wisely and justly than we.

=S. A. Joyce=