If you’ll permit us a moment or so of navel-gazing, we’d like to point out that Three Wise Men has been online for six years now as of today. That’s six blog years, which translates to about twenty-five human years given the way things have changed in the blogosphere since we first started this project of ours (in fact, I don’t believe the term blogosphere existed yet, but don’t quote me on that. We were still “surfing the Web” back in those days.) Given that this is an extremely part-time endeavor for all of us, you might be surprised at how productive we’ve been. According to our technical staff (me that is, reviewing our stats) we’ve written 3,948 posts in that time. That’s roughly 1.8 posts a day, which is pretty remarkable since all of us have at some point or another gone pretty long stretches posting either irregularly, or not at all. That’s especially true over the last year or so, as all of us have to some degree been distracted by the demands of of the real word. Also, none of us have much time these days to network and connect with other bloggers, so as to get our own unique take on the world out to the wider blogosphere. And without question, each of us has experienced periods of something approaching blog ennui, where we just don’t feel like we have much to contribute in the way of original thinking, or the time it would take to express such thoughts seems to hardly be worth the effort.

Still, the three of us keep coming back to this endeavor. Why? Well for one, it’s hard to be completely disengaged from the online world. We’re of a generation that quickly became accustomed to having a digital outlet for our thoughts. Even if we do grow tired of the effort of regularly blogging and staying abreast of the news, we’re still bound to have a moment of inspiration that we think belongs online. Granted it’s a lot easier these days to get your ideas out there via social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. But sometimes the ideas are a little too big or complicated to be expressed in a few hundred characters, and there the blog sits just waiting for you to compose an opus of whatever length you desire.

Two, this blog is our stake in the vast world of online opinion. Granted there are literally hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of blogs that garner more attention than ours, but there actually aren’t a hell of a lot of political blogs that have been around for six years, steadily cataloging the historic changes in our country over that time period. We’ve accumulated a body of work, one blog post at a time, and it’s something we’re rightfully proud of and would have difficulty walking away from permanently even if we go through periods when we take a break  from it. To some extent this blog serves as our collective identity online; when I visit another blog and leave a comment, I inevitably leave a link to this blog as well, which stands for my body of work and my place online. We may roam the internet tossing out comments and opinions left and right, but inevitably we return here.

Three, we’ve met a lot of great people this way. Of course in the way of the online world, a lot of these people we’ve “met” are not people we’ve actually encountered in real life. But that hardly seems to matter for as much these days, when ideas can be exchanged in incredible length and detail by digital media alone. As you’re probably aware, all three of us are members of the Texas Progressive Alliance, a network of bloggers who are affecting change in the real world, and not just sitting around in stained t-shirts and pajama pants banging out their latest rants. But beyond that, we’ve made connections to other bloggers, and other commentators here and on other blogs, some of whom share our political leanings and some of whom don’t quite. Some of those connections are fleeting, and some are a little more permanent (if anything defined by digital interaction can be said to be permanent) but all of them have been valuable. The people alone make this hobby worth it.

Lastly, for us anyway, this is largely our outlet to make a difference in the world. Each of us have real lives that are mostly disconnected from the issues that we care so much about. Of course we vote, and make donations, and sign petitions, and do all of the various miscellaneous things that people who are “engaged in the issues” do. But in none of that are we asked what we think should be done, how we think the world should be run. We read a lot, we care a lot about a wide variety of issues both large and small, and we spend a lot of time thinking about the things that really matter to us. So naturally we feel we’re as qualified as any other amateurs to offer our opinions on how things ought to be. I don’t know if anybody of any significance has ever read anything we wrote and thought “Yeah, that is the way it should go!” and then turned around to tell other influential people that they really ought to be trying out something these three anonymous bloggers in Texas thought of. But that doesn’t really matter. What matter is that we can make our contribution to the wide world of ideas, and have them tested by people both smarter (and dumber, if some comments and links are any indication) than us. This is the small part we take in making the world a better place, and who would really want to give up something like that?

Anyway, those are a few thoughts on why we do this. Thanks for hanging around, and hopefully we’ll have many more years of this to celebrate in the future.