I Was "Born A Liberal"

It wasn’t my choice; my dad was a liberal. He really liked FDR, as did many people back then (So did I, back then. I cried when he died. I was age 5). I even made a bet with dad in the Truman, Dewey election that Truman would win.  He thought Dewey would win. I didn’t. I was five. I can’t remember my reasoning, but it was worth $5 to me. I wanted to “crow” about it when I found  $5 bill under my breakfast plate the day after the election, but he told me, “Don’t push it, boy.” At age 18, I even tried to organize an international disaster rescue organization, and thinking back now, the “manifesto” I wrote to support it contained a lot of liberal nonsense. But my brothers, Bob and Rick, introduced me to Rush Limbaugh, all of whose opinions I don’t share, but whom I have never caught in a lie. Although many liberals count OPINIONS they don’t agree with as lies. Later my brothers dared me to read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” and my life was unalterably changed.

She’s right about most things, although, as with most people, I don’t agree with ALL her OPINIONS. On religion, specifically, though I won’t discuss religion with anybody. You can't argue with people when their argument is based on "faith." The one question she answered for me was this one: “Why do people like Nelson Rockefeller, who has more money than he’ll ever be able to spend, promote socialism, which will take it all away from him if it ever comes to power?” The answer is, POWER. For him, there are “no more worlds to conquer,” except to have the power of life and death over other people. You don’t have to OWN the money so long as you control how it’s spent, and on what. I think her most profound statement is “Galt’s Promise,” etched in the building in “Galt’s Gulch” that housed his “perpetual motion machine,” which said (paraphrased) “I swear, by my life and my love of it, never to live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

The only change I’d make to that is to substitute “person” for “man,” to include women in that. That was one of her more major mistakes, though she didn’t make many. Another is dissing the whole idea of a “superior being” we can’t even conceive of, that organizes this complicated and ingenious universe. I’d be a fool to ignore that, but I don’t necessarily think He, She, or It is like what ANY religion thinks it is. I have yet to find what form this superior being takes. It may just be an “energy source” somewhere in outer space, that doesn’t even know we exist, and our existence is just an accident of creation. In any case, such a superior intelligence would not care a whit whether or not we “worshipped” him/her/it. This intelligence would have more important things to think about, in any case. If what it does is “think,” as we define the word.

I am no longer a liberal, because I “wised up.” Neither am I a conservative, though conservatism is closer to what I am. I think of myself as a “rational individualist.” I know some people will condemn me for my views on religion, because it’s hard to move away from what you’ve been conditioned to believe all your life. That does NOT make me an atheist, just someone who believes a little differently than most. That’s the beautiful thing about this country: you’re free to believe as you wish. I know this will cost me some readers, but that’s okay. The kind of readers this will “turn off,” I don’t need. There are enough of the other kind, and they are the ones I’m trying to reach. (Just common sense)