As far as political parties go, there seems to be little to distinguish the two major players. My dad, bless him, likes to paint all Democrat politicians as gun-grabbing villians. The problem with that myopic view is that it denies the fact that there are plenty of Republican politicians on Capitol Hill who aren't exactly my gun owning best friend, either. Were that not so, we would never have had the Assault Rifle Ban in 1994. It couldn't have gone anywhere without BIPARTISAN support.
I don't trust any Washington D.C. polititian. Could be my that my Cherokee ancestry doesn't help much, but I see the "Great White Fathers" in D.C. as speaking the devil's language of lies with seriously forked tongues.
Now, among "we the people," things are a bit different. There definitely is a difference between liberals and conservatives, and it encompassess the whole of their thought processes on both sides.
On the one hand, you have selfishness and greed. That is what drives the liberal agenda. The non-office holding liberal goes for class envy big time, and wants what someone better off then them has, but doesn't want to have to use their own drive, ambition, and determination to get it. They see wealth or the lack of it as a kind of cosmic game of chance. If you're rich, you're lucky. It is only by happenstance and chance that you have aquired wealth and held it. If you're poor, you're blameless because the godess of fortune hasn't smiled on you, and no one has any control over that. The unfairness of it all drives them to manufacture fairness like latter day Robin Hoods.
This is why people who make money off of art tend to be liberal. There is a whole lot of "being in the right place at the right time" involved in the entertainment industry, at least with respect to who achieves stardom and who doesn't. Its the same in the music business and in the literary world, and I know a bit about these because I derrive some of my keep from both as a session musician and freelance writer. I know that I was in the right place at the right time, and that luck played a major role in my ability to make money doing something most people do as a hobby, or dream about making money at but never do.
But I am not a liberal because I also recognize that the reason that I can continue to make money in those industries is because I work very hard to be the best that I can be and I am willing to work harder to satisfy paying business associates than others are. So luck might have opened the door, but ambition, drive, and determination keeps those doors open.
But I digress.....
Liberal selfishness is best manifested in "a woman's right to choose." She wants to engage in the act without dealing with the consequences of her actions. She is willing to murder for convenience's sake and selfishiness is her motive. An infant requires resources in time and money to raise and also requires the frequent denial of self for the good of the child. In other words, it requires sacrafice. The liberal is not willing to sacrafice, let alone do so for personal accountability reasons, but is perfectly willing to force others to sacrafice for them against their will.
Lacking drive, ambition, and a sense of personal accountability, the liberal is all too willing to trade liberty that they have no use for because they don't understand it for security that they do understand. Rather than rise or fall on their own merits and initive, the liberal seeks to avoid the fall by looking for someone or something to play nanny to them. That is why the go for social welfare on an organized, government level, rather than a personal one.
The liberal sees a homeless person who is hungry and says, "there ought to be a program for this" -which really means that those sucessfull greedy bloodsuckers ought to be taxed into oblivion and have their wealth re-distributed.
A truly compassionate person sees someone who is hungry and offers them food, and doesn't worry about paying for it from their own pocket. They don't automatically look for government to step in. If they think in terms of a program, they think about all of the like-minded people they know in their community who have a heart for the hungry, or homeless single mothers, or whatever, and they pool their resources and live the compassion they speak of.
Liberalism doesn't have a monopoly on compassion. It does have a monopoly on monopolizing political power and wealth, born from a position of selfish greed.
The liberal doesn't want me to experience the wilderness from the seat of my Jeep. They want me to walk through it. I'd be willing to do that, and have on many occasions, when I could get enough time off from work to do so. I don't drive my Jeep because I am too lazy to hike. I drive my Jeep because it takes less time than walking, and I am too busy earning money and contirbuting to the economy 5 days a week to walk across a Mojave Desert that I could drive across in two.
The liberal denies the existence of God. He does this because the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob is a God of acountability and personal responsibility, which the liberal doesn't believe in.
The liberal clings to the soft theory of Darwinian Evolution when the hard science of the second law of thermal dynamics suggests that Darwin got it wrong. They cannot be bothered with facts that contrivine beliefs based on emotive thought.
Because they believe in evolution, they believe that society can evolve into something where poverty is unknown. If they believed in God, however, they would know that the poor will always be with us, and they would also know that they have a personal responsibility to exhibit His grace by helping them personally, when possible.
Because they can't be bothered with truth that is contrary to their fictional belief system based on emotive thought, they run with the latest junk science of the day that allows them to further their own self-centered agendas.
These agendas run the gamut from drilling for oil in someone else's back yard and not their own to keeping the woods safe for granola-munching flower children who'll never actually wander in them by getting those evil, gun toting, murdering hunters out of them.
How many hunters want the granola munching, non consumptive users banned from public lands? Not as many as compared to granola-munching non-consumptive types who want all hunters eliminated.
Why the difference?
Because first and foremost, we on the conservative side believe in liberty. That is why we don't whine over Sierra Clubbing backbackers who want to share the woods with us, by and large. Sometimes, some of us do essentially the same thing. I frequently wander the wilds because I like wild country, whether there is a hunting season on or not. I like to experience the freedom of wide open spaces. I don't want to deny someone else that sense of freedom, because I believe in liberty.
We don't go for gun control, because we believe in personal accountability and recognize that a gun can't discharge on its own. Somebody has to make it go bang.
We don't believe in killing babies for the same kind of reasons. We take responsibility for our actions, even if doing so requires sacrafice on our part.
We believe that crimes need to be punished for the same reasons.
Because we love liberty, we recognize the great though at times imperfect social experiment that the United States really is. Because we believe in drive, determination, and ambition, we cherish the liberty that allows us to have the opportunity to use these qualities to achieve whatever we can dream or devise. Because we cherish this liberty, and understand that other systems of governance don't rate it as highly, we are justifiably proud of our way of life, warts and all, and are not ashamed to proclaim it as better than any other system of government out there.
We love it so much that we are willing to lay down our lives so that others can continue to enjoy the blessings of liberty, if need be.
The liberal isn't willing to do that. The liberal talks of the common collective good, but is far too spoiled and selfish to pay the ultimate sacrafice for it.
So yeah, there is a difference. And it is vast. I believe that it is increasingly unbridgeable. I would like to let them alone to do their social experient their way, while I bask in the goodness of a tried and proven system that lets me strive to be the best that I can be and allows me the freedom to achieve anything I set my mind to achieve, and even lets me fail at times.
I'd rather be a free failure, at liberty to strive, than be forced to strive against my will for a socialist ideal.
YMMV, and all of that........
-JP
