Supporting a sacrilegious sanctuary, scientific society, and solace for Southern secularists.

Inspired by the annual question at the Edge, "what are you optimistic about for the future?", and a post on Stranger Fruit at Scienceblogs by someone who seems enraged by liberal/atheistic/scientific (they seem to be one group for him) bloggers very existence on the internets, I have decided to think optimistically for today. I want to apologize for not announcing my recent blogging break, but I did not intend to avoid blogging for such a long period. But this is a new year, and I want to start off early and hope to achieve some sort of consistency despite it being against my very nature.

It seems I recall a time called high school when many of the smartest kids were considered outcasts and despite differences in interests and opinions, often engaged socially with one another simply because their perspectives, ways of thinking and communicative tendencies often led to confusion and miscommunication when engaged with more typical patterns of thinking found in the general population. Whether due to inadequate vocabulary or an inability to conceptually grasp the discussions of the gifted, some of those lacking in such abilities would fear and despise the intellectual subset of high school students and through exclusion or occasionally use threat of violence to help supplement a hidden ego-weakness characterized by the ideas that "if I don't know what they are talking about then a) they may be better than me in some way and b) they may be talking about me."

Then came the internet and those smart people could gather together, discuss their issues, and they could not be threatened into keeping their discussions in carefully guarded privacy. It was the realization of the worst fear of many who either through choice or limitations do not participate in nor acknowledge the benefits of the academic or intellectual lifestyle. And you know, sometimes the smart kids were talking about them. So they try to counter with the one true weapon in the age of cyberspace- with words of their own. Unfortunately, they still don't know what those bright kids were talking about, so their arguments fall flat. Meanwhile, those kids- so often excluded, so often misunderstood, and so often demonized for their talents, have been sharpening their skills at debate and honing their linguistic talents to razor sharp precision.

You can almost hear them type: it's our time now.