There is no doubt in my mind that the blog revolution has forever changed the face of digital publishing. No longer is one required to be a designer, or ever have an ounce of understanding of web publishing to create visually appealing content easily and with a minimal amount of effort.

Blogs like people come in many shapes and sizes, while some may choose to use them as a digital diary or journal, others see them as an easy way to share family updates with friends and family. Have something you feel strongly about? Have something you want to rant about? Have some great art or photos you want to showcase? No problem. Start a blog.

Blogs let us easily publish our feelings, moods, thoughts, desires, art, photos and just about anything else that comes to mind.

You may be reading this thinking — Yeah… thank you Captain Obvious for stating something that is well, obvious! Had I just read this on another blog, I too would have the same thought. However, there is a reason for my reflection.

This weekend we attended a social event, in the course of getting up to date with friends a lady we know expressed confusion over this site, she was looking for family updates and wondered if we had a “family” blog.

I was a bit stunned, in my mind eleven22.org was a personal blog, in my definition of “personal” it included a wide variety of topics, including posts about family, flickr photos etc.

I was quite possibly the first time that I ever actually stopped to consider that others might now perceive eleven22.org in the same way that I did.

Yes, it was an incredibly narcissistic view for me to hold. It took that simple act of befuddled confusion on the part of our dear friend to make me aware of it.

I don’t see eleven22.org changing in content or scope because of this revelation, but I will forever be more cognizant that other people might view it in a way other than I originally intended. Hopefully the result of this knowledge will be better written posts.

As a writer, its important to know your strengths and weaknesses. Being aware of these flaws only helps to make your writing better, and to avoid the inevitable pitfalls that one can find themselves in because of them.

Take me for instance. Prone to spelling errors and questionable use of grammar, I know that I am a multi-edit type of person. Sometimes my writing makes the first cut, sometimes the 5th. Generally speaking though, two to three edits seems to be my norm.

I have also learned from painful example that when I attempt to be funny, witty, or sarcastic I usually end up looking like an asshat. So is something I try to avoid.

My wife recently brought to my attention an article that appeared in the Daily Southtown titled “Foreign orphans better than ours“. It had surfaced on an international adoption group that my wife started and had caused quite the stir. No doubt Mr. Kadner’s intention.

Adoption is an emotion soaked experience, it doesn’t matter if it is domestic or international. Here in th states the public is largely uninformed about the adoption process, costs and reasons that people turn to adoption.

I keep going back and forth trying to decide if Kadner was attempting to write something satirical, trying to be funny or just clueless. I’ve always considered writing effective if it makes me think about something, generally speaking I like those thoughts to be about the topic being written and not about the mental state of the writer.

Kadner’s rant supposes that American orphan’s are somehow lesser in quality than international orphans. Horse puckey. What he fails to realize is that people turn to international adoptions because of a desire for structure, order and assured end results — A Baby.

Domestic adoptions of young children are subjective, an applicant family needs to be chosen by a birth mother. We personally have know people who waited over a year to be chosen, only to turn to international adoption for some semblance of a structured timetable.

Add to that the fact that almost a third of birth mothers change their minds and decide to keep the baby. Good for them, bad for the family that has become emotionally invested and wasted what could amount to years of their time.

Many adoptive families have already gone through years of heartbreak prior to starting the adoption process. These are people who desperately want to be parents, to raise a baby. Its an amazing experience, why is that so hard for Kadner to understand?

In the end, Kadner comes off looking like an uneducated bush league writer trying to be witty, and funny and failing miserably. His choice to people and topic to address could only be worse if he had targeted the handicapped or mentally ill. Oh well, I suppose he always has next week.

If you stop and think about it, my generation the thirty something crowd born at the tail end of the sixties has grown up with war, turmoil and hate.

Our grandfathers had WWII and Korea, and our fathers had Vietnam, but theirs were eras of internal hate. Racism, the ugly blotch on our society that still today festers in the hearts of so many misguided fools.

But today we face racism from abroad, people taught to hate us because of who we are, what we have and whom we choose to help. Our government has made huge sweeping mistakes, meddled where they should not have meddled, and in the end have led us down a path of international hate that only continues to spiral out of control.

What is the solution? Is it something we can solve, fix, replace. No. Its that sort of thinking that got us into this mess. Is the only solution to mind our own business, go back to a cold war era?

I wish I could have grown up when my dad was a boy, it was 1938… how was his life? I’d like to think it was a lot better that it is now, but how was it to have to deal with racism. As a white man it was no doubt pretty damn easy. Would another of color think this was a golden era? Absolutely not.

The answer I think is that the scale stand in balance right now, with no interruption or change, they will topple and the world will become a much worse place as things continue to escalate.

But, and this is a big but — if we can make it move the other direction, if the Middle East can find their own peace, and if we can get the hell out of there, I think we could be on the verge of a truly Golden Age.

Have any ideas on how me can help it along? I’ll be posting mine as I think of them, I’d love it if you did too.