Welcome to the first day in the life of By The Fault. Living in San Francisco, California not far from the San Andreas Fault, I chose this fact to highlight the awesome and sometimes devastating power of politics and economics in our daily lives. Like the Earth beneath me, there is always movement afoot in politics and in the world economy. There are tremors, jolts and shakes every day and some occasional magnitude seven earthquakes. The mission of By The Fault is to cover these events and I hope provide insightful commentary on them. I believe very strongly that politics matter and require great attention for if we fail to pay attention, then quite suddenly in our lives we can find politics happening to us.
As I am a Colombian, not a native born American, and as I spend some time in some rather repressive countries (most recently Zimbabwe), I can express to you what freedom truly means to me. It is the rights of conscience inalienable. For what that truly means, I suggest that you read a short yet powerful sermon from 1791 entitled oddly enough “The Rights of Conscience Inalienable” written by John Leland (1754-1841), a Baptist minister from Grafton, Massachusetts though this sermon was probably delivered in New London, Connecticut. While it deals primarily with a religious question, Leland writes what it means to be free and to have rights of conscience.