Evolution

In the 1960s I walked around Central Park handing out flowers. I believed in peace, I was against the war in Vietnam, and I played a banjo, and I played protest songs, I was in my early teens, and I read books on Vietnam, I read books on Jim Crow. My dad had been in jail the day I was born because he was protesting because a black photo journalist could not get a job with the Daily News. Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits were the liberal wing of the Republican Party. They advocated increased access to education for all. A republican had even won the election for mayor, but he was so liberal, he eventually switched parties, John Lindsay was his name. And so I volunteered for Pete Seeger's Hudson River Revival, a big party, to help advocate for cleaning up the Hudson River, to protest dumping in the river, protest nuclear energy, protest against apartheid in America, and listen to good music. It was great to be a liberal then, because things were so clear. If you were a conservative, you were for states rights, and that meant you were for the continued pattern of human rights violations in the South. If you were a conservative, it really wasn't clear how you stood on Israel, but it was clear that you believed that white men had some sort of moral right to subjugate nonwhite people. If you were a conservative, you believed in raping the enviornment for monetary gain. The lines were drawn, the implications were clear, if you were a liberal, you were a humanist, and you believed in people. If you were a conservative you believed in the rights of censors, antienviornmentalists and the protection of human rights violations. As a Jew, you had to be a liberal because the conservatives also believed in quotas for education. A certain number of Jews could become lawyers and doctors, go to Harvard or Yale, or become cops or firemen. Firing Line was television show which clearly drew the lines between liberals (usually in the person of Patrick Moynahan) and conservatives (usually in the person of William Buckley). Unfortunately for the liberal cause, Moynahan was not as eloquent as Buckley; unfortunately for the liberal cause, Buckley slowly and very eloquently exploded the myths of what conservatives believed and what liberals believed. By definition, if you were a conservative you were not a racist, or against taking care of the enviornment. What you had a problem with, was, some sort of central control of the process. If you were a conservative, you were not a racist, but you were also not for preferential treatment just because someone happened to be Black or Latin American. It was a revelation to listen to those debates, because it helped to shape my political awareness. I went to medical school, and the guy sitting next to me was a boat person, from Vietnam; he had been a South Vietnamese Soldier, he was interred at a prison camp, he escaped with his clothes and his wife. He took courses in college, and with broken English, and a family with five children, he got into and completed medical school. All of his children attended Ivy League Universities, his family was the embodiment of the American Dream. I had to rethink my role as a war protester, what exactly had I supported? I went to a rally in which Pete Seeger sang, and Jane Fonda spoke. They never appealed to any sort of intelligence that I might have; I was supposed to think like them because they shouted at me to. There was no appeal to American values, only an assumption that if you didn't agree with them, you were for human rights violations. They were not against the war, just against our side. They were not against war, they were against us. I worked as a lifeguard for the City of NY for ten summers. I met guys who went to Catholic High Schools, who's view of things was significantly different than mine, I met guys who were veterans of Vietnam, and the story was always the same. They listened to my thoughts, then told me theirs. Sometimes we agreed, often we did not, but we were Americans, bantering about our beliefs. All of this made me realize, that liberals did not have a corner on virtue, this was the beginning of my transition. I never voted for President Reagan, I never thought of him as a seriously good president. However, within his eight years as president, the Soviet Block fell; within his 8 years, the lie that had been communism, was exposed. He changed the world more in 8 years than any president since Roosevelt. It is the only conclusion you can have about his time in office, and yet liberals cannot give him any credit; they still deride him as mentally incompetent and a joke. What he did essentially was he bankrupted the Soviet Union, so it fell, and once it was exposed, it was clear they had no corner on virtue either, in fact they were quite corrupt, but where was the acknowledgement from the left, no where, they still lament the collapse. The left supported affirmative action, a newspeak euphimism for quotas. The left was against halting Hussain's expansion in the Middle East, they were against Israel defending itself, and against any statement for support of Human Rights violations in Moslem Countries. Homosexuality is a crime punishable by death in many Arabic and Moslem countries, as is practicing or sharing or converting to a religion not Islam. These human rights lapses are somehow in accordance with current liberal principles. Saddam set fire to Kuwait's oil fields, somehow, this enviornmental catastrophy was nothing compared to Saddam's rights to enslave and slaughter people under his rule, so liberals were against the war that liberated Kuwait, and the war that ultimately led to the downfall of Saddam. I am no longer a liberal, but the word has changed in the last forty years. Forty years ago, liberal meant women's rights; now it means supporting Islam which believes in Shria law, which makes a woman, once again, a property of her husband, which allows him to kill her, at his disgression, which forces her to dress in such a way as to not "entice" other men, which does not allow her to function as a person but as a chattel. I am for human rights, so, I can, in good conciousness, no longer be a liberal. At this point in time, all of the things that might have been true about conservatives 40 years ago, are now true of liberals. They clearly are for human rights violations, they are for inequities in the allocation of resources, they are against cleaning up the enviornment, they are for dependence on foreign government, and they are for disenfranchising the voters by supporting voting irregularities. By changing the focus of enviornmentalism from cleaning up the enviornment to a referendum on whether or not our climate is changing has effectively obscured the need to clean up our enviornment of toxins which never degrade. This has been done by liberals, who made climate change the central issue of ecology, so they have effectively eliminated any serious discussion of pollution in our enviornment. The liberal agenda seems to be the enrichment of politicians who happen to be liberals. I can no longer support liberals, perhaps you need to make a list of what liberals should stand for, and what they actually stand for, then decide for yourself. You can no longer trust any media for your information, you must read, and read between the lines, get your information from all sides of the question. As I read more and more from Israeli sources, I see more and more of the distortions in our liberal media such as CNN and the NY Times. CameraOne is an Israeli media watch group, they document all of the distortions they find, they confront the culprits, and often get retractions from the media like the BBC and the NY Times and CNN, but unless you read their stuff, you will not be aware of the distortions that are taking place.