Coming out Party

I sure am hesitant to do this. By nature I am a cautious, skeptical person. I don't have a myspace page, I don't have a facebook page, I started a Twitter account and got cold feet. My first and only post was "I can't do this anymore". I think my only follower, Ashten Kutcher (was there a silent "s" in there somewhere) read it.

Call me crazy but I sincerely believe that these sites are encouraged to be set up by the government so that they can collect more and more information on us so that little by little, day by day, they can collect an archive of everything we thought, everything we ever posted and one day, if they ever needed to, all they would have to do is point out one little comment you made nine years ago, take it completely out of context, call you intolerant, label you a terrorist under the Patriot Act and throw you in a labor camp. Then they'd tell the media not to write about it and no one would ever know. Isn't that crazy?

That's where I'm at odds. Should I maintain that level of caution or should I no longer let these fears keep me from socializing? From networking? From interacting? From opening up my thoughts and sharing myself with others? I find that the more I close myself off from the world the more closed off I become to myself. I need relationships to understand myself. I need to interact with a community, to feel apart of something larger. To motivate, to encourage, to teach, to correct, to be corrected.

I need to sit up straight and let my heart breathe.

Perhaps the government's bigger plan isn't to collect data in chat rooms and blog sites. Perhaps the plan is to make everyone think that they are in order to keep people isolated. After all, it is easier to control the mass public when they are alone, captive to their own thoughts. Perhaps this wasn't such a bad idea after all. If nothing else it feels great to just vent these thoughts and not keep them bottled up inside me. I guess I'd rather work in a labor camp knowing I've expressed my mind than die isolated in fear.