Liberal v. Conservative

Liberal/conservative. Right/left. Up/down. Change/remain. The problem which always presents itself in these matters is that liberal and conservative, like middle-of-the-roader or left wing/right wing must always be kept in the perspective of the times to which those terms refer. Whether the sun is up in the sky or down below the horizon depends solely on the time of day. Your house may be on the right side of the street or the left side of the street depending upon which direction you are traveling. These are relative terms. They are in fact adjectives not really nouns in the way we use them respecting politics.

A liberal means something quite different than being liberal. A U.S. English thesaurus tells us that liberal means open-minded, broad minded, noninterventionist – tolerant! Do any of us believe that today’s liberals are tolerant? Or open minded? Well if you’re a liberal yes. If not, no.

But generally speaking in politics liberals are thought of as those who want to change the status quo. They want things to be different. Barak Obama, for example, wants the United States to be a different country than what it was last year. He is a Marxist. Guess what? That means that today in Russia he would be classed as a conservative. The Russians who want to return to the old soviet style of doing business such as former Russian president Putin are the conservatives of today. Putin, currently the Prime Minister and de facto dictator of Russia, can only be considered a liberal when measured by our standards.

And yet Karl Marx was a liberal in his time. Why? Because he wanted to change things. He wanted to get rid of the monarchy and replace it with his idea of a worker’s paradise.
So when we start throwing words around, we should check them against the backdrop of the times. During the time of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and all of our revered founders, the most conservative people were those who wanted to remain loyal to the crown. Those who wanted throw King George and his crowd out of America were liberals.

So, today, on the blogs, people yell liberal, libtard, retardican, conservative lunatic and on and on. We have a semantic problem here. If I want a thing to remain the same I could be called a conservative or a stick-in-the-mud. If I want a thing to change I could be called a liberal or an extremist or even un-patriotic. But should any of that be true? Not necessarily. We either need a new method of classifying people or we need to grow up and begin using words correctly as to meaning and in proper regard to the context of the discussion.

Calling someone an idiot because they don’t agree with you makes no sense whatsoever. Likewise, automatically agreeing with and approving another person just because that person is liberal or conservative is foolish. In his time, Jesus of Nazareth was a liberal. Julius Caesar was a conservative.

The best guide I can provide at this time is this: If a person wants to retain the status quo, think of that person as a conservative. If a person wants to change things think of that person as liberal. But wanting the government to be all powerful means the person is a governmentalist. Those who want limited government with most power and rights resting with the people are anti-governmentalists. Either might be liberal or conservative depending upon the circumstances.

Misunderstanding that resulted in the Republican loss last November and the victory of the “gracious god” Obama.

The First Day

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. Yours too. And it is very difficult to tell just what direction those lives will follow. Our government has turned against us. It has been more than 230 years since the agency which governed us was utterly against us. King George believed, perhaps rightfully so, that he owned us. That he could take whatever we had and put it to his own use and purposes. The Kind exercised that right fully and frequently until we became so sick of it that we told him to stop. We not only declared our independence but by armed force we pushed him and his government out of the country and claimed it as our own.

Since that time we have had our ups and downs. Through good governments and bad, through times of peace and times of war we have survived, even when one of those wars was between states of our own country. Americans fighting Americans. We have fought in other ways as well. Economically, socially and politically we have competed with one another peacefully for the most part. We have respected our government throughout the good times and the bad because we all believed in common principles of freedom, self-reliance, private ownership of property and the freedom to worship or not as we pleased.

As long as the people of the United States have acted on their own, allowing the government only so much of our wealth as we deemed necessary and appropriate, permitting the government the power to act for us only as far as is provided by our Constitution and holding the government in check we have prospered, grown in power and remained free. But now our government has turned against us. The people who now occupy the seats of power have thrown away the restraints of the electorate in favor of their private agenda. At the helm of our nation we now see those who firmly believe that we are incapable of managing our own affairs and that the government must manage them for us. Our leaders have chosen to destroy the capitalist system which made our country rich beyond the imagination of most in the world. They have decided that collectivism is the only course to follow in order to insure justice.

Never mind that socialism brings injustice to most and only a base equality for all, an equality which puts us all at the poorest level of life. A system tried by communists the world over which enriched only those in power and impoverished the rest. An economic system the likes of which have failed time and time again and will surely fail here as well. But we are well instructed to remember that it took the Russians seventy years to throw off the yoke of their communist dictators. Are we to live the same lives of deprivation, brutality and further warfare to get back to the way we were?

What are you doing about it today? Are you concerned? Do you care? Do you believe that there are men who are infallible? Do you believe that in spite of so many mistakes already made in the past two months that somehow or other, things will work themselves out okay without your effort? Do you ask for others to avoid sending political e-mail to you? Do you complain about those of us who discuss politics? Are you ashamed to admit what you believe, how you think, how you voted?

It is time for everyone to stand up for America. To those who say we need to take care of the rest of the world, give the rest of the world a chance, surrender to a world government I warn you, be careful of what you think you want or need. What you will get is sure to surprise and disappoint you. So as you begin this first day, think about where you really want to go with this life. Compare it with where you are being taken.