Over the last 16 years, this blog and website have been a labor of love for me. Some years have been more challenging than others (especially the last four), but I somehow managed to keep to a Tuesday and Friday posting schedule. Tuesday was reserved for political, real life and editorial posts while Friday was my designated day for fun posts and recreational TV/movie recommendations, etc. This was my pattern until January 2017.
After President Trump’s inauguration in January of that year, I created another website, Ashnotes, to handle my political oriented posts. I was angry; not because Donald Trump had won in 2016, but because he was using his office to knowingly gaslight the nation. He told people that no one could be trusted but him and anyone who disagreed with him was fake or a liar. He accused others of doing things we saw him do. He told us that we shouldn’t believe the things we saw or the things we heard unless he told us to believe them.
With that as a foundation, I created the Ashnotes website with the mission statement of “Hungering for Facts – Driven to Find the Truth.” No article would appear on the site that wasn’t verified by an independent news organization. Well, the website lasted a year and posted 38 articles. I closed the site down in December 2017 because as I stated in its last post, “…I underestimated the rate at which those in political power could spew these lies and, sadly, quickly burned out trying to rebut the untruths.”
To say I was disappointed is to put it lightly. It appeared that words like truth, honesty and integrity had lost their meaning in that administration. So, the period between January 2018 to December 2020 was given to sporadic posting. There was no joy in having and/or in maintaining this site. And more than once I almost let it go.
I don’t know that the future will be any better in terms of whether or not the Biden administration will be more honest or more forthright than the Trump administration was. However, I suspect they’ll be less noisy. Therefore, we’re going to try to make ago of this site again. The future is not promised, but there will be a post on Friday. After that, we’ll see.
