Contrarian Conservatism

I never know what to title my posts, but it seems this title fits some of my overall thinking.

Usually I like to discuss general issues that I think will benefit our society as a whole. I focus on education and the economy for most of my ideas or support for better policies. I feel if we improve our country for the whole then the other issues are easier to tackle. I think this is especially important with education. If you want a strong democracy, you need an educated populace. There are times though when I observe something and I feel it needs to be discussed.

I have been saying I am trying to give up posting on the all the news stories because they are just too hyperbolic, argumentative, and downright nasty. Well like most New Year’s resolution, this has fallen by the way side. Lately I have made a few posts on the major liberal sites like Huffington Post, Salon, and Thinkprogress. I am trying to enter subtle conservative thinking into the blogs. I get tired of the idiotic right wing diatribe calling itself conservative so I am trying to show the liberals there is rational conservative thinking in a small way.

As a reader knows, the liberal and conservative websites are going to have different priorities for their stories. This is obviously issue based. One issue I have noticed that is lacking on the liberal sites and which is shocking to me is the lack of discussion of race relations recently. I know I do not read them all the time, but I do read them pretty regularly and have seen just about nothing discussing what is going on in our country with the police shootings and riots. I would have thought there would be more discussion and especially some ideas on how to improve this situation.

As mentioned before I am a big believer in education and I feel that education in the long run will help to overcome discrimination in our society. I also feel an improved economy with equal opportunity for all will help improve this issue. The current problem shows we are regressing in our society. I do not think issues with a person’s race is a problem for everyone, but enough of our society is affected that this should be moved up to a national priority.

One of the problems is the large amount of endemic poverty and ignorance for large sections of both Caucasians and African Americans. Again education will help alleviate this problem, but the situation is so bad even an immediate improvement in education for all will take about 2-3 generations for race relations to show real improvement. We need to start implementing ideas to find some common ground to get started or the regression in race relations will only get worse. And this may come to a shock to some people, we do not want this to happen.

If you want to be a conservative, then you need to think how I conserve our values. One core value is the idea that all men are created equal and how we accomplish this is to give equal opportunity to all. Liberal in the 1700’s, something to conserve now.

And coincidence of coincidence, the better half showed me this video while I was typing this post. It is not about the specific issue mentioned above, yet indirectly it is very relevant. It is a humorous video from another perspective that depicts some of the problems ignorance plays in a multi-cultural society. Try this link and I hope you enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWynJkN5HbQ or https://youtu.be/DWynJkN5HbQ

I use to read George Will regularly. I still do every now and then. Recently there was an article where he called Gov. Huckabee appalling. Check this link out.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mike-huckabees-awful-crusade/2015/05/08/d983dc9e-f51e-11e4-b2f3-af5479e6bbdd_story.html

Also in the article he mentions Adlai Stevenson as a reference point for one of his points. I have always thought he was one of our last great thinkers in politics. Yes, I know he is a liberal, but he had a good grasp of some ideas our country needed to tackle at the time. If we had, maybe things would be different. Also I plan to post about another liberal soon, as a conservative someone I don’t always agree with, but someone who represents the last of the era when some politicians actually did work.