I’m going to let you in on a little secret:

I’m A Liberal

I’ll let you in on another secret. The definition of a liberal is:

Someone who can’t be happy until everyone is happy

Another way of saying that is that I am a lifelong guy for the underdog and I simply gush empathy in almost everything I do. I can’t help it, it is just what I am. I’m sure the MAGA crowd thinks I should be cured of this terrible malady. Their savior, Ayn Rand, says that empathy is the scourge of democracy and needs to be totally eliminated.

When I say I am a liberal, don’t take that to mean I am an avowed Democrat. I admit that I haven’t voted for a Republican president since Reagan hijacked that mantel. I haven’t voted for any Republican in congress since Trump laid total waste to that name and turned it over to the most radical of radicals. When I lived in a VERY Red county in this VERY red State I had numerous friends who were still clinging to whatever respectability the Republican name had, but those days are gone now, and I’m not confident that they will ever come back. To me, that is kind of scary.

But, then again, it seems that at least lately, the only solution that the Democrats believe is to just throw money at the problem until it goes away. Yes, I am a social liberal, but at the same time I am a fiscal conservative. So, once again, I am seemingly stuck between a rock and a hard place.

---

To put these problems in some kind of perspective, let me pull up some quotes about all this from my hero, Will Rogers:

The more I see of politics the more I wonder what in the world any man would ever want to take it up for. Then some people wonder why the best men in the community are not office holders – September 27, 1925

Did you ever know a politician that was not facing the “most critical time in the world’s affairs” every time he spoke in public. -January 13, 1924

---

These quotes are as true today as they were when Will spoke them almost a hundred years ago. It’s a shame that in today’s political world, you seemingly have to take sides. You are either Red or Blue. Any other declaration is invalid. Having only two choices eliminates the ability to think for yourself. You have to do whatever the “leaders” of your chosen group decide is right. Of course, that is how Hitler came to reign in Germany in the 1930s, and we know how that came out. I’m concerned the same thing might be happening now within the Republican Party.

But, then again maybe I am just getting too concerned about all of this stuff. It seems that it has been going on for at least a hundred years, and we are still around, so maybe I shouldn’t worry about it much.

Let’s close this post out with some thought from Plato a couple of thousand years ago. Of course, he was on the leading edge of all this democracy stuff.

Plato believed that there were far too many uneducated people who voted. To him, that meant that a lot of votes were being cast through “irrational logic”, and to him that dilutes the power of democracy. He believed that few people were properly educated. So, the solution was that we must educate the masses. In other words, our goal should be to get to a point where everyone is thinking freely and rationally.

To close out this post, maybe I am just an old codger who is overly concerned about something that won’t likely happen until after I am gone?

What do you think?