"We Support the Troops!"

Well, another week, and another wonderment, to bend the old cliché. Unfortunately, most of my wonderment is fixed in pessimistic observations of The Far Left. Those People—as Robert E. Lee graciously called his enemies—are totally beyond the pale. When I was a young, foolish child, I was a Left Wing loon who didn’t know any better because I didn’t think things through. The quote has many attributions, but I go with Von Hindenberg: “If you are not a liberal when you are young, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative when you are older, you have no brain.”

A few days ago, I was harshly handled by a liberal friend because of an alleged attack on her family; i.e. “using them as blog fodder”. I reviewed all 186 of my blog posts at UPI since 2005, and when I replied with the falsity of her accusation, I received the de rigueur apology. All this because I had made a personal reply of disbelief that her sister is teaching her kindergarten-age nephew that George W. Bush is an evil ogre who aggrandizes the rich, plotted 9/11 with evil corporate types to steal the Constitution, and is engaged in a super-conspiracy to establish some sort of Christian, conservative theocracy in America. My friend was actually proud that her sister has such “progressive” views.

I was aghast. If an adult, with fully-formed views of the world, comes to me and spouts such rubbish, I’ll sigh and engage in a debate, armed with facts on my side that an adult can comprehend. I’ll speak slowly and use monosyllabic words that even the most ardent liberal can understand.

Programming a child with such partisan political viewpoints borders on abuse, in my humble opinion.

I was a child of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. I heard some incomprehensible grumblings from the grown-ups about [Supreme Court Justice] Earl Warren, and the nepotism of the Kennedy clan. They fretted about a Communist named Khrushchev, and a nuclear-wielding petty dictator named Castro. They watched a far-away war in a place called Vietnam, and worried about the future as it escalated.

What they didn’t do was plop me into a seat and lecture me on what they considered the goods and evils of America. They were grown-ups, and they considered it incumbent upon themselves to exercise the Serenity prayer: the serenity to accept the things they couldn’t change, the courage to change the things they could, and the wisdom to know the difference. They knew I would eventually inherit the mess of the post-modern world, but they didn’t indoctrinate me in their view of what was good or bad at the time. They were not acquainted with Ayn Rand and her philosophical view of morality; that came to me later through independent study.

Instead they gave me two invaluable gifts. They allowed me to enjoy my childhood, and discover the world at my own pace. More importantly, they raised me to think for myself. They didn’t explicitly tell me what was right or wrong, by their lights, but they urged me to examine things as they exist and draw my own conclusions. They taught me that once you seize onto a belief, you stand beside it if you’re sincere, and be prepared to defend that belief with facts and reason.

My parents weren’t some kind of enlightened ultra-progressives for instilling this in me. They were conservative, Christian products of The Great Depression of the 1920s-‘30s. My father fought Nazis in War II, and my uncles fought Japanese Imperialism in the Pacific during that war. They all came home with a common goal: my cousins and I would be richer, better educated, and more aware of the world than they had been.

I have some cousins who have done outstanding things; one of them was Secretary of the Navy. Another is a renowned composer/songwriter who wrote several mega-hits of the 1960s. Another, more distant cousin is a country/western superstar of legendary proportions. I’m kind of the black sheep of the family; I aspired to be a hell-raiser and trouble-maker, and succeeded quite nicely in that field of endeavor. Every family has its dark side.

Despite my failure of expectations, I retained my parents’ legacy of the gift of thought. It became the standard for my life, and the one thing I tried to pass along to my children. It’s a simple concept: think!

I don’t care what you, or anyone, believe, as long as you think about it. You have your mind made up, commit to it, make a stand, and may the best intellect win, based upon the most factual input. When I was young, stupid, and in rebellion, I wasted a lot of time shouting slogans I didn’t really understand. I suppose that’s part of growing up. Another of my cousins set me straight on this during a marathon night. He wasn’t a celebrity; Weyman was a Special Forces op [Green Beret] who had served three tours in Nam at the time he confronted me. He went on to serve a fourth tour, then abruptly resigned and returned to South Carolina to run his daddy’s feed store.

That may not be the stuff of Hollyweird heroes, but he shared that gift of thinking, and for reasons he’s never bothered to explain to this day, his thoughts and beliefs led him to turn his back on a limitless military career.

My own thinking and observations have led me down The Grateful Dead’s “long, strange road.” I am not the sharpest pencil in the jar, and my thinking has too often proven faulty. Nevertheless, I stood by what I believed, and continue to do so.

Circling back to the present, I was taken aback because of my simple admonition to my friend. I didn’t “attack her family”; I urged what my folks taught me: think! I sent an e-mail in this regard. Don’t ruin that child’s youth with partisan indoctrination; teach him to think, and eventually cut him loose to do so. Kids are amazingly resilient, and quite capable of deciding for themselves what’s right or wrong, often at an alarmingly young age.

So, I offer my humble opinion about “Think!”, and I get slimed like a Ghostbuster. Some vast schism has opened between at least one of my liberal friends and myself. Robert Duvall from “Open Range” echoes: “And for what? More cows?”

I back liberals on one general principal: I don’t like the direction of the Iraq war. I think it could have been handled more efficiently. That said, I take umbrage with every funeral protester, cowardly cut-and-run politician, and those punks who are re-creating the Nam era by spitting on our troops. My attention span is formed by reading books and writing letters by hand; I haven’t forgotten the horror of 9/11, nor do I underestimate the threat to America if liberal appeasement continues.

Call me a neo-Nazi if you wish, but the next time you stomp a cockroach in your kitchen, think. That’s what terrorists are: cockroaches. Think about the principle that applies to leaving them kids alone, as Pink Floyd said. You want to do something positive for their future, give them the gift I was given: tell them to think, and then stand back and see what happens. We still have nuclear-wielding despots, far-away wars, and an uncertain future. Socialism died in Western Europe with the USSR, but it's much closer to home with the next presidential election.

(This should not be construed as an “attack” on anyone’s family. All persons mentioned herein are products of the author’s imagination, and no reference to actual persons, living or dead, should be inferred. No animals were harmed in the composition of this blog post.)