Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Understand that I have no intention of dying anytime soon, but I do have every intention of leaving TPM better than I found it, just as I want to leave the world better than I found it. This will, in fact, be my final post here at TPM. Yes, I've said that before, but this really is my farewell. You'll understand why by the end of this post.

I want to be "busy being born," as Dylan said. And so I must be getting on with what is left of my life. You will find these words are my final gift to you. To my dear friends, like-minded acquaintances and detractors alike.

TESTAMENTS AND WILL

On Revolution:
We Americans have always pursued our self-interest. We have always been misfits and revolutionaries, and we still are today

Those who landed at Plymouth Rock crossed an ocean to flee religious tyranny and establish their own society. The Boston Tea Party let the British know tariffs were not appreciated. The Revolutionary War exerted our collective will to be independent of England and subject to no one but ourselves.

We hate taxes. We like wide-open spaces. We want security. We pursue wealth as if it's going out of style, especially when the latest fad is poverty. We like things our way. We admire our politicians when they tell us what we want to hear, and we shun all with which we disagree. We consume what we can afford (and even what we can't), and we revel in winning wars, lotteries and arguments.

There are heroes galore across this country, but when it comes election time, we all become selfish. We all vote for the change that we estimate will help us individually, whether our neighbor may benefit or not. I don't believe that "enlightened self-interest" actually operates in our representative democracy. We are generally too selfish, too hooked on a sense of entitlement.

Instead, I think, pure self-interest is at work in our politics. Somehow that works out most of the time. It has allowed us to bring forth leaders of remarkable foresight: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, FDR, JFK and Obama, to name only a few.

And our system of pure self-interest also has brought us George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Warren Harding, Ted "Bring Home the Bacon" Stevens and the crooked alderman on our city council.

Our selfishness has its place. We distrust the concentration of power in any form, whether that power is used by government, religion, corporations, special interests or the "other" party. Mindful of the fragility of liberty, we still want "the system" to work for the little guy, because we may become the little guy next week if we are not already him today.

It's been said that we get the government we deserve. I think so, too. We still look out for ourselves. And because of this, our government will always be no wiser than we are. We must stay educated and vigilant, lest the right to choose our government call out the worst in us and demand revolution.

On Faith:
I want to share with you what I believe is the essence of leading a Christian life. It is, in a word, Humility. Needless to say, this has not been the popular interpretation.

I have been an agnostic for most of the past 35 years, despite being raised Catholic. Yet I have been attending services the past few months at a United Methodist church. The rekindling of my faith has helped me greatly in coping with a number of recent tragedies in my life. They have, indeed, left me humbled.

When I read about the life of Christ, when I consider the example He set for me, I see a spirit of humility that pervaded the life of a simple carpenter, born in a manger, called to sacrifice and pleading for His life even as He yielded willingly to death.

To be humble before G_d (wink to bslev), to submit myself to His will, to be charitable toward others and thankful for all I have and even for all that has been taken away. Humility.

On My Recent Life:
As many here already know, I am facing several personal challenges. Among them are my pending disability case and my pending divorce. My wife left me this spring for a younger man. I recently heard from my wife again after a silence of four months and I take no solace in relating to you her terrible comeuppance.

As she told me, she was ejected rudely from her new boyfriend's apartment. He destroyed or trashed most of her belongings. She has been homeless for two months, sleeping on benches or at the homes of strangers. She has been raped four times, held at gunpoint and is now pregnant with one of her attacker's seed. She learned of her pregnancy only yesterday from her physician, who minutes later placed her in a psychiatric ward for observation.

Today, I was about to leave my apartment to keep a much-needed appointment across town with my counselor. When I stepped out the door, I found a blank spot where my Jeep Cherokee had been parked last night. My vehicle had been stolen.

I cannot conceive of the hardships endured by paraplegics, soldiers suffering PTSD or the traumatic series of tragedies my wife set in motion for both of us, especially herself. I hurt terribly for her suffering, and I long for us both to return to prosperous, if separate, lives.

On SCAAMD:
As the election grew increasingly nasty this summer, raider99 proposed an idea that was honed and added to by numerous TPM posters, myself included. We wanted to create an organization that would empower people to respond directly to media distortions, propaganda and biased reporting.

From this proposal grew a group of a dozen or so people who expressed their desire to realize this goal. Through a series of conference calls, we decided to develop the web site central to our concept. However, the original volunteer developer left the project without telling us, after installing only the basic framework for a site. A month passed after we enlisted him before we realized we still had no functioning site.

Being too disabled for normal work, I have no job. But I had time and had invested much of it in arranging the cooperation of other media watchdog groups which have allowed us to aggregate their content as part of the SCAAMD site.

So I set about building the site myself. In about a month and a half, the SCAAMD site became fully functional.  The features list of SCAAMD.org is long and meets most of our original goals. Among those features:

- Authors with special access above that of a registered user may submit articles directly to our site through an interface similar to a TPM blog post.
- Site administrators may place in articles from reputable media watchdogs such as Media Matters for America and FAIR.org.
- Media contacts entered in our site database may be inserted directly into articles, where they appear in a small box embedded in the article text.
- Local and regional news are not above criticism, and the SCAAMD site has 50 blog pages--one for each state--waiting for users to email their deconstructions of local media stories to an administrator.
- A ratings system allows users to give articles one to five stars.
- Links to Technorati, Digg and other social networking sites are built in, as is the ability to print an article or enlarge its font size on screen.
- Registered users can create profiles and send private messages to other users.
- As of Thursday, the SCAAMD site map was cataloged by Google, which now indexes over 60 pages of the SCAAMD site.

But what is lacking at SCAAMD is the will to use the tools made available. The site lacks the people to operate it, and given the pressing demands of my personal life, I cannot devote more time to driving traffic to the site or creating content. At present, no sites link to SCAAMD. This could be remedied. With the addition of more content, devotion and expertise, the site could spring to life in an instant. And the work of countering media spin could be in your hands.

So this is my final wish for you at TPM, where SCAAMD was born:

I bequeath to you http://scaamd.org and all that it may accomplish. May those of you who have time to devote to a just cause find in it the rewards of hard work, good citizenship, better media and better government.

Good luck and good-bye.