Opening Post

This is a blog about ideas, and about consequences that flow from those ideas. I was inspired to start writing when I first visited my in-laws in China, and listening to their stories about the rise and fall of Maoist communism.

However, this blog isn't about Chairman Mao per se. Instead, it is more about a revelation I had over that period of time. Long before meeting my wife, I was a child in school, learning about the greatest sins in the world's past -- like communism and nazism -- and I asked myself "If we can see it so well now how terrible people in the past were, how come they couldn't see it too?" In my own case I grew up in what we called "The South," or that collection of states that fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. I read all about slavery and the Jim Crow period, and beyond that I heard more about a post-Civil War dark age from the older people in my neighborhood, so terrifying that they never taught about it in school.

Again, I had the same question, "Why?" Why would people do those kinds of things? How could they not know better? ... And just as importantly, if they didn't know better then, what sins could we be committing right now, but not know it until it's in the history books generations from now?

This blog is the answer I've found to all of these questions, and more. For now, I will leave you with the title: Ideas Have Consequences. The ideas we choose to accept, will very often dictate our actions in ways we cannot predict, both for bad and good.