Is This Thing On?
By The last time I wrote for LGM was August 15, 2008 — my sign-off post. So it’s been nearly six years. It feels like a long time ago that I was part of the LGM family; that I could shed my law-student skin and become bean and be brassier and more vocal and less measured and more engaged than life in law school allowed. And it was a long time ago. But when I logged on to write this post in celebration of 10 years (!) of LGM, there all my old posts were. Just sitting there. In WordPress. As if I had never left.
But I did leave, to begin practicing civil rights law and pushing to effect some of the changes I called for (and so unstintingly) in my tenure at LGM. And wow, what a difference it’s made. In August 2008, George W. Bush was the president; the U.S. was engaged in armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; the government was indefinitely detaining prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and fighting the detainees’ efforts to access Article III courts; and reproductive rights were under attack. Now, in May 2014, things have changed! For the better! Barack Obama is the president; the Iraq war has ended; we still have troops in Afghanistan; Guantanamo Bay remains open with no end in sight; and the rights to abortion and contraception are under fierce attack. Wait a minute….
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
While more change certainly would be better in some arenas — the cartoonish nature of our politics and the inefficacy of our federal government, by way of head-palm-obvious examples — there’s great comfort in the steadiness of LGM. It remains today home to the same diverse and engaging posts as in 2008 (and more of them) by a too-heavily-male motley crew of very similar composition, with the same loyal, overeducated, engaged cast of commenters that I came to know as an LGM contributor and to rely upon to test my assumptions and assertions and call me out when I went too far or got something wrong. (Though of course there are amusing and legendary exceptions. I’m
looking at you, “I am aware of all Internet traditions,” known to some as the “greatest thread in the history of the Intertrons.”)
Recently, I’ve taken baby steps back into online conversations. I became an active Twitter user; I commented on blogs; I agitated for my current workplace to start its own blog. These tentative efforts at a (triumphant?) return to online life have given me renewed appreciation for the open, freewheeling, multidisciplinary, earnest-one-minute-and-satirizing-the-next online home I had at LGM, and made me grateful to the original LGM team for creating this place and keeping it going all this time.
So here’s to 10 years of LGM and to 10 more (at least). Maybe by the time LGM can drink legally, we’ll have seen some real political change. Hey, a bean can dream.