Friday, May 27, 2016

POLITICAL LABELS

By Allan McNew

A person with the name or handle of Dale Day responded to my opinion piece titled WHAT IS "THE RIGHT" AND WHAT IS "CONSERVATIVE"? I wish to thank him for his response and respectfully submit a rejoinder.*

“Dale Day said...

The whole tirade about Left/Right, Liberal/Conservative is nothing but babble by political pundits trying to save their own souls. Both sides want one thing - the preservation of their own feifs.

The vast number of Americans could care less about these labels. They only want a system that keeps them safe and lets them provide for their families.”*

First, a word about your's truly:

I'm not sure of how the title of “pundit” accurately applies to me. I've spent the majority of the last forty plus years working outdoors in all sorts of weather often smelling like creosote at the end of the day. Near the beginning of that I shoveled dirt all day long for $1.65 an hour, then for about five years I smelled like a bag of cement after work. I even made a living for a while milking cows. I've worked in Death Valley in the summer and Colorado in the winter. I've worked in backyards from communities like Beverly Hills to the most genuinely poverty stricken people who still have a roof of sorts over their heads, among people of a wide variety of national and cultural origins, from densely urban to sparsely populated rural. I socially mix with all "ethnic" types from middle class to people who utilize social services. I've served on a jury and have also appeared before the bench.

I wasn't trained to write.

First, it's true that those who wield power and profit from the status quo on both political sides seek to preserve their back room empire. The long delayed public reaction is how Trump and Sanders became what they are to this election cycle. While I don't often agree with Jose Angel Gutierrez, his observation maybe 45 years ago “The Republican and Democratic parties are a two headed goat that feeds from the same trough” is on the mark, even though for maybe 40 years he has given up on the notion of a race based third political party and has worked from within the Democratic Party.

Second, it's also true most people usually don't spend much time thinking about “right” or “left” nor appear to be consumed by political agenda that is so vociferously important to some on either consciously political side. It is a further truth that most people want to be safe, secure, economically stable, happy in their pursuits and some even plan for tomorrow. While they might not habitually think in political terms, what the consciously political “right” and the “left” does or doesn't do affects them, sometimes in dramatic ways.

For example, a friend who owns a small trucking company was recently informed by the California Air Resources Board he's only allowed to run 5000 miles a year. Out of the blue, empowered by Governor Brown's “environmental protection” executive directive (even hard core progressive-socialist greenies in the legislature were too afraid of the normally Democrat friendly electorate to pass legislation introduced to do this because of the negative financial impact to their constituencies) they wantonly destroyed his livelihood. His case is echoed across many occupations and professions.

On the other end, there are people who utilize social services who might otherwise be working if not for progressive-socialist agenda killing business in California and creating a worse than Jimmy Carter economy while cynically hustling votes for the Democratic Party by blaming economic problems they cause on the political right.

Most younger Californians get their political / social notions from the educational system and media of all sorts that are dominated by the political left. Even all those years ago, I was influenced in my high school years by socio-political notions impacting the 70's which originated with the '60's counterculture, even though it wasn't a background part of education in those days. I believe that even more now than then, people who are too young to have the slightest clue as to who or what Kennedy, LBJ and Nixon were are having their subliminal notions of culture and politics formed in a direct line of succession from those who do – the communist influenced students who invaded and occupied the
administration building on campus in the late 60's are now aged professors on the inside passing the torch to their own students, and it all becomes a part of contemporary culture at large.

Therefore the valid labels of right and left, liberal and conservative applied to discussion of political differences.

WHAT IS "THE RIGHT" AND WHAT IS "CONSERVATIVE"?

http://politicalpistachio.blogspot.com/2016/05/what-is-right-and-what-is-conservative.html#links

Dale Day https://plus.google.com/107654426653312879749

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

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