A long delayed response from Facebook to a friend who was concerned about a rather sharp remark I made. It was aimed at the person she was quoting, not at her, and I've made that clear. However, the question still needs answering, just exactly where do I stand?
Where to start? Well, as I have so so many times, I despise liberals and conservatives both. I refuse to consider myself a liberal. A progressive, yes, but not a liberal.
Today in many school districts it is so horrible a violation of school rules for a boy to make a gun shape out of his finger that the child is likely to be suspended or even expelled. In some cases it is apparently against the law because police have been called into the "incident". This attitude is a direct gift from the liberals to all of America. Criminalizing little boys for acting like normal healthy little boys is the product of diseased minds. America's war on children is a liberal war on children. I have no doubt of that.
On the other hand, the conservatives have declared war on just about everyone and everything except the narrow, tiny minority who completely agree with them.
In the 60s and 70s I put most of my effort into condemning the liberal extremists. The Students for a Democratic Society, the protesters who burned American flags and praised Ho Chi Minh, and all their supporters. I was disgusted by every symbol of Che Guevara I ever saw. Back before my prodigal daughter decided to shun me, I was driving with her and saw Che's face painted on the building. I expressed my disgust. Her response was, "Who?" That pleased me. This once ubiquitous symbol of left-wing insanity wasn't even recognized by the next generation. That was years ago. His popularity has continued its resurgent rise. That's sad. The only bad thing about Che's death is that it came years too late to save many of his victims.
If you are interested, my political attitude is well expressed by my blog post: http://el-naranjal-del-desierto.blogspot.com/2014/03/heil-stalin-aka-vodka-vs-bourbon.html.
As far as Obamacare or the ACA, it's just about the worst imaginable law possible. It has only one good thing going for it -- It is a big improvement over the way things were before it was passed. That is not to say is a good law. Is a rotten, bad law. But again, it's better than what we had before it passed. This nation can do much better. We can join every other industrialized, every other wealthy, every other civilized nation, in the world and pass a proper single-payer system. We are the only wealthy, powerful, industrialized, nation that has not done so.
I think of the ACA in terms like this: if a starving man is granted access to all the garbage cans in town, his condition has improved very much. It is certainly better that he has access to all that fresh, not yet rotten garbage, than if he died of starvation. On the other hand, it really could be a lot better than that. Couldn't it?
And my reference? Let's just say that while I considerate it harsh, but accurate, I am certain that there are probably millions who, if they heard it, would say it was inflammatory. To put it another way, this particular man is one of what ever brassy Ann Coulter refers to as "our blacks".
He is a brilliant and gifted neurosurgeon...well, here's a link that expresses my feelings: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/16/ben-carson-was-a-role-model-for-black-teens-until-he-sold-out-to-the-right.html
For anyone who happens to read this and has encountered my ideas before you will find a lot of repetition contained in this statement. But that's because while I may have said it to you, I haven't said them to everyone.
Anyone interested my positions can take a look at: http://el-naranjal-del-desierto.blogspot.com. Just use the taglines philosophy and politics to get my views in those areas.
So I'm accustomed to liberals considering me a conservative and conservatives considering me a liberal. But I am neither. And I never will be. Both are ideologies. Both require you to have certain shared convictions. If I share convictions with you, is because we happen to agree, not because I know what I'm supposed to believe. I work very hard to look at the facts. I believe that reality is real. I believe that only a fool refuses to face the facts. Over the years I've had to give up many a cherished position; positions that were emotionally deeply satisfying to me, but which conflicted with reality. It hurt. But I was true to my beliefs and my philosophy. That was more than adequate compensation for what I lost.
People think I'm crazy when I say that you can be a progressive and be a liberal, or be a progressive and be a moderate, or even be a progressive and be a conservative. A conservative progressive is someone who believes we should continue moving forward not go back into the past. They just want to go carefully and thoughtfully forward and make sure that what we are doing is the right thing. One example of a person I would regard as a conservative progressive is Pres. Eisenhower.
The reason people are shocked by this concept is that ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has been driving everyone out of the party who did not agree with their rigid doctrinal declarations. To be a conservative was not sufficient. You had to be a particular kind of extremist conservative, otherwise you were declared a RINO and expelled from the party. This is made Republican Party more and more a religious organization and less and less a purely political one.
This from the party that considers the left to be "politically correct"!
So that's a summation of who I am. You can't assume anything about where I stand on a position unless you have a good grip on the facts. You can be fairly certain that wherever they lead, I will be there. Other than that? I can only repeat that when I navigate I navigate with the stars which are actually there in the sky. I consider one of the most awful statements the entire history of philosophy to be the comment made by Plato, "If we are to discuss the cosmos we must not look at the stars."
PS,
I can't even begin to get into religion. It's enough to say that I am a deeply religious, but--surprise surprise -- a very independent thinker who prefers my God like I prefer my whiskey, straight.
No comments:
Post a Comment