Pale: (noun) An area within which one is privileged or protected. (adjective) Deficient in color or intensity of color.
Both definitions seem to fit my insatiable want to start a blog. Perhaps guests will read something that will pick them up in the midst of darkness, or bring them back to reality when everything seems minuscule, or pop their balloon when they need to put their feet back on terra firma. Or perhaps you need to see something obscured by the fence in your life that keeps you protected.
What Pale Side of Life is: Anything I want. It’s the most taken-for-granted freedom we Americans enjoy. At any given moment this blog could be big, small, shallow, deep, colorful, drab, upsetting, enlightening, dark or bright. A single post can be any of these to different people.
What Pale Side of Life is not: Not much. Though it will never be my intention to offend, some will be. Again, it’s a free country. I have just as much right to offend as you have to be offended. Will I purposefully offend? No. Can I control you perceptions? Um, no.
Or, as a transitive verb, to enclose with pales or fence in. If you fence in, by definition you are fencing out. This implies a failure to be open to other ideas. Perhaps it also means being “beyond the pale” or beyond the limits of propriety as in “their public conduct is beyond the pale” like the recent outburst by Joe Wilson.
The thing is, as I have said on numerous occasions and as you re-iterate here, this is America, a wonderful place of differing opinions and attitudes where we all have the freedom to choose what we will believe in.
The ability to express the desire to share these opinions to many is facilitated by the internet. Is that a good or bad thing? Online, we can be anonymous if we choose. We can state things as fact without giving any corroborating evidence. There are many people out there who believe everything they read, others who only believe what is said or written by a particular faction or people of a certain mindset. This is true of both the right and the left, conservatives and liberals. Discourse has broken down lately and everyone seems to want to hurt the other side.
If we could step back and return to the time where we were there for each other, regardless of our political and religious beliefs, the world would be a better place.
That said, congratulations on fulfilling your desire to communicate. I have never been offended by any of the back and forth that we have shared and hope that I have not offended you or others with my ideas and beliefs.
God bless us all, not just the USA.