Eschewing Sophistry and Fulfilling My Mission?

So is it terrifying, or transcendental that the 19th Century writers I spend most of my time with have started to speak to me?  Does Lydia Maria Child really have a voice that echoes profoundly across the centuries, or have my ears changed?  I take the title of both this post and my entire blog from the 1830's radical herself.  In an editorial to all her fellow abolitionists, Child writes:

Honestly follow your own convictions, and thus fulfil your mission, be it centripetal or centrifugal; but for your own soul's sake, see that you do it honestly.  Eschew all sophistry, all evasion, all false pretences.  If the very devil seem to you better than he is represented, say it of him, but call him by his name.

Maybe the devil doesn't have red horns and a pitchfork - but he's still the freakin' devil.  And, in Child's context, maybe slavery didn't always appear as horrible as expected - but it was still slavery, for cryin' out loud.

And so I commence my very own campaign to call things by their names.  I'm not sure that I have a mission in life, and I'm not sure that all sophistry will be eschewed, but here's hoping!

Perhaps it's just that I'm in graduate school and hoping to make a living out of having an opinion and coercing others into believing it, maybe it's because I've recently realized that I'm a bona fide adult, or maybe it's that I'm living on the edges of the country in a city full of strangeness, but I seem to have an awful lot of opinions lately... ok, so I've always had a lot of opinions, but these are different - they're not stupid.  Entirely.

So prepare thyselves, gentle readers, for a cavalcade of  commentary, a slough of sarcasm, and not a little antiquated allusions, vocabulary, phrases and grammar, beginning with my very own screen name.  If you like novels and you haven't read all 1500 pages of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa - boy are you missing out.  In addition to setting all kinds of generic conventions and giving us the literary Libertine at his finest, Clarissa grants the world the astonishing Anna Howe.  Whether she's cursing mankind, toying with her husband-to-be by telling him she hates him, or ordering people to be dragged through fish ponds, Anna Howe is a woman to be reckoned with.  So, naturally, I admire her.  Clearly.

I begin:  The girl at Revolutionary Soup may have been flustered by my question, but letting the soup I'd just paid six bucks for sit there for over ten minutes, then telling me to "microwave it" when I asked if it would still be hot was still really stupid.  And kind of bitchy.  And perfectly Charlottesville.

Cheers, Ya'll.