31 October 1997

My parents were democrats. My grandmother on my mother’s side was one-quarter Cherokee Indian, one of thirteen brothers and sisters who suffered the Great Depression in rural Oklahoma. I grew up hearing stories of poverty and hardship. I was raised with the notion that President Franklin D. Roosevelt (whose name was always spoken with awed reverence) was the greatest man who ever lived. His ideas of expanded government were what saved the nation, don’t you know, and anyone who said different had better be ready to fight or flee.

I remember "white only" and "black only" signs on restrooms and water fountains. Black people were subservient, extremely polite – and excluded from polite society . . . even within the lower middle class.

And I remember a deep sense of shame at being part of a race that would treat other human beings this way.

In the early 60s, we moved to a rural area of South Texas, where I attended high school and learned that blacks weren’t the only class of people with whom I could not readily associate. Hell, we didn’t even have any blacks where I went to high school – unless you count Hulen Greathouse, who spent a year there and was passably tolerated because he was one hell of a football player. And also, of course, because he knew his place.

No, blacks weren’t a problem in South Texas in the early 60s. But the Messkins were. (That’s Mexicans for those of you not versed in the vernacular.) Our region was about 70 percent Hispanic. But of course you wouldn’t know it from the social life of the community.

One semester a trio of migrant farm workers’ kids rode our bus to school every day. They literally stank from not having access to bathing facilities. The other kids on the bus made their lives utterly miserable. You could see it in their eyes, in their demeanor.

And it never quite set well with me. Wrong is wrong. But speaking out against it would have ended what little social life I enjoyed. Which only made the guilt that much worse.

Vietnam was heating up and it was all over the news – as were the protesters and the arrival of the "peace and love" generation that I knew I must become part of. And the day after high school graduation I moved to Southern California.

An uncle got me into a good union job and I thought that life couldn’t get any sweeter. I grew my hair long and moved in with a bunch of like-minded individuals.

Then the questions started arising.

I spent awhile in San Francisco, seeking the beautiful people and the beautiful life, only to find it was pretty much a lie. "Peace and love" was mostly a joke. The people there would cut your throat for a decent drug score. Never, before or since, have I witnessed such suspicion, greed, and avarice as I saw among the "love" generation in San Francisco.

Then I got drafted, and I figured "What the hell, the hippies are liars. Maybe I’ll find myself in the Army." In 1969 I found myself in Pleiku, Vietnam. I was a helicopter door-gunner. I’ll never forget sitting at a newly discovered weapons cache about 15 clicks inside Cambodia, listening to the Armed Forces Vietnam Network on my battery powered transistor radio as President Nixon denied that we were in Cambodia.

In 1970 I was out of the Army and back to that cushy union job – and convinced that America was going to hell in a hand basket because of those evil Republicans and "Tricky Dick".

It was a time of extreme turmoil, for the country and for me personally. I knew that Nixon was a liar, but I also knew that the "peace" movement was phony. I’d seen first hand the horrific result of Communism, and I was soon to see that unionism was not much different.

I’m a hard worker. Always have been. I love to do the best job I possibly can. Excellence has always been and will ever remain a personal goal in everything I attempt.

But don’t try that in a union. I was reprimanded by mine – told that if I continued to do more than the "contract" called for I would lose my job. Unions, it seems, don’t tolerate excellence. They want everyone to be the same. It occurred to me that this was socialism. And socialism, absent the consent of the governed, is communism. In unionism, everyone gets paid the same, whether you work hard or not. Slugs get the same as achievers. Not only that, slugs can’t be fired for being slugs when there’s a union. Achievement is damned? Excellence is punished? That’s not the foundation upon which the greatest nation on earth was built.

But I was a die-hard Democrat, liberal to my now visibly shaken core.

So along comes Jimmy Carter. Now here was man in whom real liberals could rejoice. Surely he would fix everything. I quit my commie job, went back to college on the GI bill, majored in journalism, and voted for the man who would provide salvation.

A funny thing happened on the way to salvation: the economy went to hell, gas lines formed, Americans were taken hostage, the Panama Canal was given to people who had no part in building it. Chaos reigned, and the savior mumbled about malaise.

Politically, morally, and spiritually I was a lost puppy.

Then some has-been actor appeared on the scene, talking economic renewal and claiming that Americans didn’t need government handouts, that anyone could be whatever he or she wanted to be.
All they had to do was believe in their own God-given ability.

The liberals scoffed. The hostages were released. The economy flourished. The Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union collapsed (they really were an evil empire).

And my soul was restored. Of all things conservatism saved the day. Here was something that worked. For decades I believed in a lie, and that lie was liberalism.

But one thing hasn’t changed. My compassion for the downtrodden remains unshaken and unquenched. The difference is the discovery that any definition of compassion that doesn’t embrace the notion of personal responsibility is fatally flawed. I still care deeply about issues of discrimination. It’s just that I have discovered that the downtrodden must participate in their renewal.

People are not helped by government give-away programs, but rather by being shown that the only limitations they have are the ones they place upon themselves. The rapidly growing black middle class proves it – and it terrifies the liberal left and their willing lapdogs in the press. How else can you explain that J.C. Watts was jerked off the air by the electronic media at the 1996 Republican National Convention? Watts delivered the keynote address. Watts is a conservative. He’s from rural Oklahoma. He was elected to the U.S. Congress in a predominantly white district. And he’s black. Liberals don’t want you to know that there’s any such thing as a black conservative. Or else they want to portray them as Uncle Toms, willing to sell out their cultural roots to gain "whitey’s" favor. Ask Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas. Ask Professor Thomas Sowell. Ask any number of successful people of color who have discovered that the way out of their condition is to work hard, believe in themselves, and hold fast to the moral, spiritual, and ethical principles that made this country great.

Liberalism looks at minorities and says, "You can’t succeed without our help." What an insult to any thinking person. This policy blatantly states that minorities are inherently inferior. Hogwash.

Liberal policies – attained mostly through judicial activism, since most liberal ideas are losers at the ballot box – have given us moral relativism, which has spawned increased crime, failing schools, runaway welfare (three trillion dollars in transfer payments without any decrease in the poverty level), increased divorce rates, and the absurd notion that babies can be ripped from the womb because the mother doesn’t think it convenient to give birth. Society is to blame for every ill. No person is ever responsible for their actions.

White American males are bad. The white middle class is to blame for everything. Don’t you ever get tired of the bleatings of white liberal guilt trips?

The flip side of the coin is conservatism, which proclaims, "You can succeed. The only real limitations this life has to offer are those you place on yourselves. Come join us!"

Not convinced? Look at the results (a terrifying prospect for any true liberal). Jimmy Carter gave us the Iran hostage crisis. George Bush gave us Just Cause and Desert Storm. Jimmy Carter gave us gas lines and the worst economy since the Great Depression. Ronald Reagan gave us a thriving economy and a renewed sense of self worth. William Jefferson Clinton gave us the most scandal-fraught administration in American political history. Ronald Reagan restored a belief in our government, our nation, and ourselves.

Results. Consequences.

Liberals say they do what they do because they care. But since what they do clearly doesn’t work, their caring is hollow. Conservatives don’t go about proclaiming the moral high ground. They just roll up their sleeves and make the country work.

Liberals scream about their rights, and invent new ones every day. Conservatives simply defend the rights our founding fathers gave us. As Mohandas K. Gandhi once said, "Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having."

I used to be a liberal, much like Winston Churchill who once said, "If you’re not a liberal when you’re 20 you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 40 you have no brain."