Written by Thomas Magstadt   

Stumble
1 a : to fall into sin or waywardness b : to make an error: blunder c : to come to an obstacle to belief
2 : to trip in walking or running
3 a : to walk unsteadily or clumsily b : to speak or act in a hesitant or faltering manner
4 a : to come upon unexpectedly or by chance b : to fall or move carelessly
~Merriam-Webster online dictionary

Talking to two of my best friends about blogging, I can see I'm not connecting. We often stumble upon an idea when we're walking. Or when we stop for coffee, as we do most every morning.

The wait staff at First Watch all know us. Or at Eddy's, where the proprietor, a popular local personality and Irish folk singer by night, keeps one table on Tuesday mornings just for us.

We're regulars. And they all know that when we get rolling on a topic, there's no stopping us.

I can see my comrades think the whole blogosphere thing is stupid – a waste of time better spent doing something worthwhile. Maybe they're right.

It's just a lot of noise, they both agree. Too much chatter, no filtering mechanism. No great Cyber Editor telling us what's worth reading and what isn't. Hmm…

How to explain why I think blogs are a good idea? Then it hits me: StumbleUpon.com.

That's it! I'll tell them about free Internet "clipping services" that allow the user to decide what he or she wants to see.

Long story short, it worked. I had stumbled upon something that prompted what turned out to be a wide-ranging conversation about life, science, history, politics – and America's role in the world.

We talked about the role of dumb luck in shaping our own lives. We all three have stumbled upon things that led us in directions we would never have gone, down paths we would never have taken, on our own. And not just things – people, too. Teachers, spouses or partners, friends, colleagues, and so on.

We talked about how we all stumble through life in a real sense, even those of us who have at times deluded ourselves into thinking we were actually in control. In retrospect, at each and every step along the way, luck and happenstance were operating in ways we were often unaware of at the time.

We talked about what it takes to succeed. How we stumbled upon a career or into a job we never imagined ourselves having or doing. And how we stumbled and fell – perhaps more than once – at critical moments. Chances are the individuals who have been most helpful or important in our lives are people we stumbled upon somewhere along the way.

We talked about how the same thing is true of nations and how our history as a nation is a perfect example. Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the New World. He set out to prove the world isn't flat. He thought he had reached the East Indies. He didn't know the Pacific Ocean existed.

The Founders stumbled upon the idea of a federal republic based on the separation of powers, after the Articles of Confederation failed. At the Philadelphia Convention they stumbled upon the principle that "all men are created equal" and proceeded to institutionalize slavery! The only way that glaring self-contradiction could be resolved was to pretend that blacks were lesser beings (three-fifths of a white person, to be exact).

Two decades later, the US Supreme Court first stumbled onto the absurd idea that corporations are no different from persons in the eyes of the law. Subsequent high court rulings have built on that disastrous precedent, deciding that campaign contributions are a form of protected speech to which all "persons" under the First and Fourteenth Amendments have an irrevocable right. Which is why we now have the best Congress money can buy. Clearly, a lot of time can elapse between when nations stumble and when they fall.

No doubt about it: stumbling plays a big role in life. But not if you listen to leading Republicans in the US Congress or the leading Republican contenders for the White House. Thus, the current Republican front runner Newt Gingrich said in a recent debate, "It is fundamentally wrong to give people money for 99 weeks for doing nothing." In his twisted view of reality, there's no actionable difference between joblessness and laziness.

In the world according to Newt, "Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it is illegal.”

Gingrich and the greed-is-good crowd obviously believe that the 1% owe nothing to chance or luck. Unlike Columbus's contemporaries, they know the world isn't flat. But they want us to believe the playing field is.

They are rich because they are superior to the rest of us. And the poor deserve to be poor.