  Hello there my brothers and sisters in revolution I've had a frank discussion with Peter Sawatzky, and we are in agreement that a large scale blogging revolution must take place - it must be all encompassing. More posts, more ideas, more activity. No Apathy. I've been writing at www.xanga.com/somethingzen for quite a while now, but I decided to give blogger a try, just to make sure that I have chosen to best way to blog. I'm a little put-off initially, it's a different environment, but I'm not going to let that keep me from giving it a fair chance. Either way, through xanga or blogger (the medium is not important, the medium is -not- the message) we have got to get the word across.
I figure maybe I should introduce myself, after all I'm new here, aren't I? I am a writer, in the most literal sense. I have finished the draft of a novel I haven't bothered to name yet, and I'm working on short stories pretty much steady. I'm waiting two months for my draft to mature, waiting until I'm ready to edit the thing. You get the idea. But writing isn't the end of it.
I'm a young Buddhist, with a scary amount of dedication to Buddhist practice and the following of Dharma as purely as possible. I'm not very good at it, but I try very hard. I'm a Theravada/Zen Buddhist, and I live in the west so crossing two very different traditions like that is acceptable. Beyond even that, I'm a political thinker. I am a socialist, in a broad sense of the word. I have read Marx, and I don't agree with all of it, but I greatly respect the ideology of communism, and the spirit it represents.
That said, I'm not sure pure communism has a place in the modern world, especially after Marxism-Leninism has twisted it so fully that I'm not sure it could ever recover. Socialism, however, lives on. The ideology that it is immoral for rich men to sail around on yachts while women and children die in the streets of starvation. Does that make sense to you? It should. There is nothing wrong with redistribution of wealth according to fairness, and laws should be passed in the interests of those who need them most, not those who have the most economic or political power.
Politics should be focused on the helpless and the voiceless, not on the bourgeois who use their connections and money to engineer government into an engine working in their favor. That's my little red rant. 
