It has crossed my mind from time to time that people might mistakenly perceive that I'm speaking for other people or organizations I'm connected to, either on this blog or in other contexts. Being in DC has magnified this concern. It's a surprisingly small community of people who deal with each other so frequently that it's fairly easy to learn and remember who knows whom, who said what to whom, who did what to whom, etc. Enemies are surprisingly easy to make, and it's also surprisingly easy to inadvertantly drag other people you may somehow be connected to into your battles just by association.
But that's a pity, if for no other reason than it affects people's autonomy and compromises their honesty. It makes everything political, so you can't do what you think best at the moment because you have to be worried about payback. I suppose that's true in any context, but in Washington where so many people are here to try to affect the world, and so many battles necessarily are fought in the process, a sense of political pragmatism is particularly important.
I really like being in Washington. I really like being somewhere where important things happen. But I absolutely, positively do not want to get sucked in and corrupted by it. While discretion is valuable in any context, and I'm mindful of how I refer to other people on my blog particularly in any identifying way, I do not want to have to compromise my candor, my honesty. To the extent that this blog tracks my intellectual journey, it needs to be a true record of it. If I were to compromise that, I think the journey would be over and there'd be nothing left to tell. The destruction of my idealism would be complete. I want to believe that principle and independent thinking can triumph over all. I will hang on as tightly as I can to keep it from ever turning into a wishful fiction.
That said, there is still the pragmatic problem of inadvertantly sucking in people and organizations I care about into my own little drama. So I want to state clearly and explicitly for the record that I speak for myself. Only myself. People I know may agree with some, much, or even all of what I have to say. The same is true in reverse. But I am an independent thinker and so are my acquaintances. The following statement is therefore unequivocably true: what I communicate, including here on this blog, unless otherwise stated and authorized by another party, REPRESENTS ONLY MY OPINIONS, BELIEFS, ATTITUDES, PHILOSOPHIES, KNOWLEDGE, AND/OR UNDERSTANDING. Regardless of any affiliation, what appears here is only what I as Cathy Gellis, Individual, have to say.