My parents didn’t but most men went to the pub every evening and most women went to the Women’s Institute everye day seventy years ago in the farming village in England where I was a kid.

They went to talk about the news.  Much of it was local gossip but there was also a lot of national and international news on the radio that provoked debate.

Most people just enjoyed the entertainment but some of them very much wanted their neighbors to see sense.  The same sense they saw, of course…

That was how opinions about current events were formed.

Then came TV and the start of a new culture where men and women no longer so rigidly segregated themselves socially.

And then came social media.  Now we can have neighbors we never see but with whom we can chat or just listen to every day.

One way I’m different from my parents is I can’t stop myself from trying to get everyone, myself included, to see sense.  Social media gives me that opportunity and it also offers a fascinating challenge.

We all learn, with varying success, how to persuade others face to face and how to recognize when we’re the one who is mistaken.  But how to do that when we’re not face to face?

This is my first post in many months.  While renovating the house and surroundings of our new home outside Gettysburg, PA over the past year and moving our stuff from Maine I had no time for carefully researched posts.  Instead, I began posting links to the work of others on Facebook.

Now, I’ve dealt with the huge backlog of comments here (10,188 of them spam from bots) and I’m working on a piece about my current understanding of reality.

I have more building and yard work still to do but it’s less urgent so I’m starting to aim now for a new balance between that work along with my ongoing attempt to make sense of events, creating original content here about domestic and foreign policy here, and curating the work of others on Facebook.

But because I have to think about things before I speak, I won’t be on Twitter.