Those of you who know me, can see that I am no longer a moderator here. I have done this work for something like six years, and have enjoyed keeping this little corner of the world a comfortable place to visit, and exchange ideas, and accomplishments. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
My choice to step down as Moderator, comes not from a lack of desire to keep the gauge-model trains what it has been, but rather, a feeling of being sold into slavery, into an environment that is no longer friendly to me.
Most of you know that I am retired Navy. I served from 1961-1983. I enlisted before Viet Nam "was", when I was still 17, because I firmly believed in the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America , and still do.
The latest sale of the gauge-model trains, brought us here, to Crowdgather/Zealot. The discussions I was privileged to be part of, were disheartening, to say the very least. I can live with the rules this new group wishes to impose on membership here, but I cannot, in good conscience, enforce them. I was never meant to be a totalitarian dictator, and I feel that is the mold I was being expected to fill.
In stepping down, as a moderator, I will no longer have to check in here on a daily basis, I can visit, as I choose, and participate where I can be of most help to the members here.
In a very real sense, this will be a place I come to when, and because I want to. Not a place I have to, and not to enforce what I feel are over the top "dictates, totalitarian denials of freedom, and outright stripping of culture".
I'll be here now and then, as a model railroader, but never as one of the emperor"s Storm Troopers. To those I worked with, who continue to moderate here, I bid you farewell, I am no longer one of you. To those who I have known as friends, I'll be around....................(until my dissent is heard by the empire, and I am banished under pain of death)
My choice to step down as Moderator, comes not from a lack of desire to keep the gauge-model trains what it has been, but rather, a feeling of being sold into slavery, into an environment that is no longer friendly to me.
Most of you know that I am retired Navy. I served from 1961-1983. I enlisted before Viet Nam "was", when I was still 17, because I firmly believed in the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America , and still do.
The latest sale of the gauge-model trains, brought us here, to Crowdgather/Zealot. The discussions I was privileged to be part of, were disheartening, to say the very least. I can live with the rules this new group wishes to impose on membership here, but I cannot, in good conscience, enforce them. I was never meant to be a totalitarian dictator, and I feel that is the mold I was being expected to fill.
In stepping down, as a moderator, I will no longer have to check in here on a daily basis, I can visit, as I choose, and participate where I can be of most help to the members here.
In a very real sense, this will be a place I come to when, and because I want to. Not a place I have to, and not to enforce what I feel are over the top "dictates, totalitarian denials of freedom, and outright stripping of culture".
I'll be here now and then, as a model railroader, but never as one of the emperor"s Storm Troopers. To those I worked with, who continue to moderate here, I bid you farewell, I am no longer one of you. To those who I have known as friends, I'll be around....................(until my dissent is heard by the empire, and I am banished under pain of death)
