GROWING OLDER AND WISER

Keith Burgess-Jackson has a great article out that presents in his usual breezy style the story of how he moved from being a Leftist to being a conservative. It is a very common move over a lifetime of course -- with Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan being the best-known examples -- and Keith does strongly associate the move with gaining increasing experience and understanding of life's realities. I liked this sentence: "The good news is that as long as one lives, one can be saved into conservatism". Keith is an atheist but obviously he uses evengelical language to describe what a big and beneficial change the move from Left to Right can be. As a lifelong conservative myself, I have never experienced that "conversion" -- I have had a lifetime of poking fun at Leftists instead. There are of course heaps of lifetime conservatives but you rarely hear from them. They are just happily getting on with their own lives and doing their best to dodge being bothered by all the busybodies and meddlers of the world. I myself have always spoken up (for the last 40 years) because I have always found Leftism to be so incredibly at variance with the facts -- and for some reason that has always bothered me greatly.

Incidentally, for the origin of the saying about heartless youth that Keith quotes at the beginning of his article, see under "Leftist Youth" here

Once again experience brings a move from Left to Right: "When I was growing up, the family dinner was a tradition. Above the clatter of plates, my parents discussed the world around us from their perspectives at either end of the great oak table. Together, we'd review the news of the day put into context by the events of yesterday, and always we'd think about tomorrow. Politics was a main course, and being a working-class family from Massachusetts, we were fed a healthy serving of Democratic Party principles. ... But I expect to break with that tradition. Come November, I'll be casting my vote for George Bush."

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