conservative

I see where researchers have determined that people are born either conservative or liberal. While this does not explain how staunch liberals can sometimes become conservative, or how good conservatives can sometimes go bad, I have to at least hold out the possibility that it may be true. When I was just 10 years old, I got up one morning and raced downstairs to get the morning paper only to read this headline: “Kennedy Wins On Flood Of Votes From Big Cities.” I was greatly disappointed. Both of my parents, as well as my grandparents, were all happy. Most people I knew seemed thrilled about the whole thing. But I was not happy. I could not even say why.

Through the years after that, things would happen from time to time which would bolster my growing conservative convictions. I remember seeing an ad on TV in 1964 of a growing mushroom cloud, and something about a little girl with a flower (the details are fuzzy). Because I could not believe that a guy running for president planned to blow up the world, this ad actually turned me against President Johnson, whose campaign ran the ad trying to scare everyone against Goldwater. I also knew that this president was responsible for something called the Great Society, which, although I didn’t fully understand the implications of it all, I knew it didn’t feel right. Maybe because, at the time, I was also learning in high school about things such as democracy, socialism, communism, and fascism, and that this Great Society thing was about the government spending lots and lots of our money. Since it was also around this time that prices, which had been pretty stable for as long as I could remember, started to rise, (nickel candy bars were suddenly a dime; ten cent comic books were selling for twelve or even fifteen cents), I put the two together and concluded that government spending was what was causing prices to get so high.

But I think that what really did it for me the most was after Nixon became president and the news media starting attacking him over Vietnam. This made absolutely no sense to me because I knew that Johnson had started and escalated the war and I didn’t remember the press attacking him so mercilessly. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it seemed like the press criticized Johnson about the war, but seemed to spew vitriol over the president who inherited it.

There is a lot more to the story, of course, but this is probably enough to show how my thought processes worked, and how my apparently natural inclination towards conservatism blossomed.