Discovering One Is A Conservative

Dana Casey tells us how she came to realize she was a conservative even though she grew up in a “union household and surrounded by progressive peers.”

It wasn't an overnight realization, but one she came to after years of observing her friends and family, no longer being able to reconcile the hypocrisy of their words and actions.

Her first big exposure to that hypocrisy? Food.

I remember some of the students sitting around one afternoon talking about the beauty of Native Americans and their respect for nature, recounting that, when the natives killed an animal, they first prayed to thank gods, ancestors, or perhaps the animal itself. My schoolmates talked about how the natives honored the animal they had killed by using every part, wasting none: the meat for food, the skin for clothes, the bones for tools and jewelry, the sinew for bindings and cords, and the hooves for rattles and bells. I could feel the awe this inspired in my fellow classmates. They felt enlightened, that a truth was revealed.

The next morning, I brought a scrapple sandwich to school for breakfast. A friend, who was indeed wearing a calico skirt with long johns and work boots (although no deodorant) leaned over to me and asked, “What ’cha eating?”

“Scrapple,” I replied.

“Eww! That’s disgusting! Do you know what they put in that stuff?” Thus the Scrapple Theory was born to me at the tender age of 16.

For those of you who are not familiar with scrapple, it is corn meal, ground pork, and spices baked in a loaf pan, cooled, sliced, and fried in butter. It is often eaten with catsup, a nice sweet contrast to the peppery spiciness. It is a true American specialty of the Pennsylvania Dutch. It was originally made from “scraps” of pork (i.e., scrapple) left over from butchering that could not be sold or used elsewhere, in order to avoid waste!

….According to my schoolmates, Native Americans who “honor” an animal by using all of its parts are noble human beings in touch with nature. However, a good German peasant (from whom the Pennsylvania Dutch originated) who makes use of the entire animal is abhorrent and disgusting. This scrapple sandwich epiphany was one of my first observations of ubiquitous liberal progressive hypocrisy.

Such was her first experience with Progressive Hypocrisy, where if it came from Western Civilization it is automatically bad, but if it comes from some place other than that, it's good. This is despite the same philosophy being applied to the same action. But wait, it gets worse!

I would read books like J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and Carlos Castaneda’s “The Teachings of Don Juan,” expecting the illuminating awakenings my friends professed, but the books always fell flat. I just didn’t get it. I wondered what was wrong with me. It turns out that there was little to get. The books were crap.

But I also read the theology of C.S. Lewis and George McDonald, the fiction of Ayn Rand and Elizabeth Gouge, the classics like “The Histories” by Herodotus, “Confessions” by Augustine, and the philosophies and plays of the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. And my faith was strong; it was a constant, and I went through bouts of church-going that irritated my liberal friends to no end. They actually said to me, “How can someone as intelligent as you believe in nonsense like that, especially Catholic dogma?” Ironically, they believed in runes, tarot cards, psychics, the supernatural, séances, auras, and every other idiot mystical fad that came around.

New Age was in. That “old style religion” was out, even though the New Age stuff was really ancient. It was merely repackaged as something else. This also crossed over into failed political ideologies.

Socialism was the 'religion' of the enlightened Progressives. It would make everyone equal. But as more than a few 'experiments' in socialism proved, it failed to meet the needs of the people and eventually failed, collapsing from within due to self-inflicted wounds. But that hasn't stopped today's Progressives from wanting to try that experiment again because, after all, they're much smarter and better informed than those who went before them...or so they believe. But they aren't. If anything, they are even less well informed because what they know isn't knowledge, but indoctrination. It is dogma, not to be questioned and adhered to even if reality proves it is a false belief.

I started to see that liberal policies rewarded poor choices, while penalizing those who worked hard, didn’t get pregnant as a teen, and were responsible for taking care of oneself. It really ticked me off. Little by little, I was starting to see that liberalism was hypocritical and destructive while conservatism actually promoted individual freedom, self-reliance, laws applied equally and fairly to each individual, and limited government. These were ideas I thought liberals, particularly hippie-type liberals, actually believed. I was mistaken.

And there's the crux of the matter. “Liberal policies rewarded poor choices.” Why? Because poor choices mean more people become dependent upon government, specifically government run by the Progressive Liberal elite who enabled these people to make those poor choices and not suffer the consequences. After all, beggars are easier to please. Free and independent men and women, not so much. Some of that is because they don't want anything from government other than to be left alone, something the Progressives hate because it means they can't easily control them through bribery or threats to withhold their largess, that largess gained by taking it from the people who actually created it.

Is it any wonder Ms. Casey has discovered the hypocrisy of the Left and wants nothing to do with it?

Welcome home, Dana.