What is this? I don’t know yet.

I am here to learn. I think one of the best ways to learn is to form thoughts into words.

I recently helped write a book1, and it helped me solidify many thoughts I had on the roles technology and media have played on political polarization. The actual process of turning weird brain goop into structured, linear thoughts presented to a random other person is a crazy undertaking. Nothing can test your own opinions like the need to actually force them to make sense to someone without any of the same brain goop you’ve got. Many times, some thought I had didn’t hold up to the scrutiny of paper, much less a skeptical reader. Other times, dots began to connect that I didn’t even realize were there before.

There’s some insane shit going on in the world right now2, and it’s too much for anyone to process. I want to try though.

I didn’t care for politics much until well into adulthood. Turns out it matters though, oops. When it did come time to hold discussions with people who had thought much more about things than I did, I only stood to infuriate them. I held many beliefs that I’d taken for granted, and spouted out things I’d heard before that sounded right, but I really hadn’t scrutinized them much at all for myself. People much smarter than me had already heard all these things before, and helped me to see both the impact and importance of getting things right, but also the complexity in doing so.

Now, I do a lot of thinking and not a lot of deciding. I’m annoyingly politically moderate. I listen to perspectives on both sides, trying to combine them in some intricate web of the theory of the world. My motivation for the last four years has been to understand why people think they way they do. My default reaction to almost anyone is to ask why they believe it, and what could have led them astray in that process. I’ve learned a lot about myself and others in this process, but it doesn’t actually make the world a better place.

I’m here to toy with ideas, for sure. But in doing so I hope to come to conclusions. I’m gonna get stuff wrong, anyway. I strive to improve my thinking, to change my mind, to be called a hypocrite by people who think that people are static. Let this be a place to document that.

I don’t expect this blog to be all about politics though. Might be well after 2020 that I can start nerding out about technology and space and psychology and history and antitrust and Star Wars… but don’t you worry I’m still here for that trash.

  1. Peace Talks: The Good News of Jesus in a Donkey-Elephant War. The book topic was not mine, but I contributed a chapter to it about the role modern times have played on political polarization. The book is otherwise written by my father Dave Drum who is a pastor, and I hitched a ride on his writing career when for the first time I felt our passions about the world aligned. It was a very rewarding experience, but I requested that my writing credit remain minimal because of some of the more religious-based arguments in there. Some parts will hold up better than others, but specifically the book makes strong arguments against gay marriage and abortion, which I certainly do not share. ↩

  2. June 7 2020: The global COVID-19 pandemic has recently lost the spotlight to the global protests highlighting police brutality and Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd and others. It’s the height of my hubris that I actually believe that this footnote will actually be revealing to almost anyone reading this in the future, and that I’ll be writing for years to come. But also, with the rate the news cycle moves these days, I truly cannot predict what people will even be thinking about next week. ↩