This is an outstanding article by a wonderfully gifted writer, Jill Clayton. It is very interesting to me that like Jill, I was raised in a very liberal home. My mother, who was a most wonderful and caring woman, was very far to the left. She was always involved in protests against the Vietnam war, lots of liberal, far left professors, both men and women were always over at our home for poetry readings, listening to hippie peace, love, hope and change music(sound familiar)that made me start to question her politics. My mother was an english professor and taught at a couple of the small, private colleges that were located in the town we lived in. I got so sick of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Cat(I am really a muslim)Stevens, Peter, Paul and Mary, I thought about breaking her records. I thankfully discovered the Grateful Dead, West Coast sound, blues, Hendrix, Doors, Canned Heat, Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, John Mayall, Robert Johnson.
I remember small gatherings at our home of local chapter of the ACLU, other nasty liberal, far left oragnizations, and several of the fledgling environazi organizations that have helped kill our independence and furthered our addiction to foreign oil. Just a sample of the many causes and events that ensured I would become the conservative backlash to a very liberal upbringing.
One of my most vivid memories I recall is witnessing Vietnam veterans who had returned from Vietnam, getting spit on and garbage thrown at them as they just walked through campus on their way to classes at one of the local colleges. There was a protest going on and these vets had to go through the protest to get to their classes and that is how they were treated by the unwashed, long haired mass of leftarded idiots that were making their presence known at colleges all across America. It was also the first time I really lost my cool and went after these stupid liberals who had never worked a day in their sorry lives. Myself and three of my friends jumped right in and helped these veterans who had unselfishly served in the military so loser, liberal traitors were FREE to protest against those who fought and died to preserve those rights. We made the front page of the local paper and it was a watershed event in my young life. I lost a lot of friends in Vietnam and what I witnessed became very personal. I tried to enlist twice but was 4F for bad knees and eyesight.
My mom was also a great humanitarian up till the day she died. Always one to be of service to others and extend help to those who really needed it. That is one of the best attributes I learned from her as many of my friends will attest to.
So I really identify with what Jill has so eloquently written here. Many of the battles being fought today across America are ones that were birthed in the 1960's and 1970's. Progressives, socialism, unions of entitlement, we know the drill and the what we must do. I am honored that Jill has granted permission to post her fine essay here.
Feel free to share this. All she and I ask is that you make sure Jill gets full and proper credit for her fine work. Sit back and read this.
This is the post of the night!
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Thoughts on the Liberal Thought Process
By Jill Clayton
For the last couple of days I've been wandering about in liberal haunts on the web, dropping a little conservative thought here and there, just to stir things up a little and make people think. I've gotten a lot of crap flung right back at me, called a "Teabagger" and "redneck trash," etc., but there have been a few people who engaged me in conversation after I told them I used to be a registered Democrat. They naturally asked me why I "changed." And I told them. Some continued to question, and I see that as a good thing. When these questions come at me, I usually begin with ObamaCare. Because I'm a cancer survivor who was caught out in 2010 with no health insurance, my story serves as a way to prop open the doors of liberal minds just long enough for me to toss in a few seeds of doubt. If I encounter resistance there, I try the subject of the Race Card. Either way, I'm pretty confident that I'm being heard for a few seconds before the doors slam shut again. But then, that might be all it takes.
Since last year when Obamacare was passed, the Tea Party has risen out of nowhere and has become a real force to be reckoned with by swinging elections all over the country, booting out incumbent dinosaurs and generally flushing the Congressional toilet. Because of the Tea Party's apparent power in the voting booth, the mainstream media has also spent the last year going out of its way to brand this loosely gathered group as a racist movement aimed at shoving the United States back to 1956. Last time I checked, blaming the majority for the actions of a few was called "Prejudice." Why does this matter? Because liberal hypocrisy is one of the most frustrating things about trying to talk to liberals. It flies in the face of Common Sense, leading one to conclude that liberals are either stupid or brainwashed. But in all reality, they're not stupid. They're just misled - and have been for years and years.
Today's Democratic Party is a study in hypocrisy. Race-baiting and the flagrant disregard for the U.S. Constitution by the Democrats has now gotten so commonplace that even average Americans who don't normally pay attention to politics have now noticed it -- and it's starting to anger them. I know a few middle-of-the road Democrats and even they are now questioning Obama and the mainstream media. It finally took Obama declaring a military action in Libya without even consulting Congress and the American people beforehand to make them ask, "WTF?" What is really getting to the moderate Left is the fact that not only did Obama attack Libya, he did so while on vacation. Even my oh-so-liberal California and Seattle family members are questioning this. But then, it always takes something really huge to make people shake off their complacency and take notice of what's going on, doesn't it? I think that what's going on with my liberal friends and family members is a slower version of the same thing that "converted" me about three years ago. Here's a summary of sorts about how I, a longtime Democrat, changed my mind and in 2008, left the Democratic party forever.
Evolution of a Liberal-turned-Conservative
As a child who was born in union-controlled Detroit and later moved to southern California, I went through a very liberal public school system and was raised by a staunch feminist radical - my mother. She also influenced my brothers as well - both of whom are liberal to this day. My mother wasn't a stay-at-home, baking cookies type of Mom. Instead, Mom was at every NOW meeting in our area, or always off at some women's gathering. She was gone so often that I began cooking for my family at the age of ten and cleaning house. I changed both my brothers' diapers and babysat them from the age of thirteen and on. My father was a "closet Republican" who never dared to speak his point of view lest he draw the Wrath of Mom. I remember one fight they had where Mom actually said to him, "People just don't like you because you still support Tricky Dick!" (Nixon). Fortunately, my dad divorced her eight years later. However, like my mother, I began to get involved in feminist and liberal causes when I was barely in the seventh grade. I wore "Reagan is the Anti-Christ" T-shirts, and talked loudly and often about how the Republicans were "raping" the country and screwing the Poor. I was "Pro-Choice" because Mom said I should be, even when I didn't one hundred percent understand what that meant. Because I was indoctrinated at such a young age, I believed this wholeheartedly.
But, there were some things I began to disagree with my mother on, and this caused a great deal of tension between her and I when I reached my mid-teens. The internal questioning of Mom's ideals began the year that I turned fifteen and Mom declared that we could have Santa decorations around the house for Christmas, but no "Jesus-stuff." This contradiction confused me right away. I was raised a Lutheran, and Mom took us to church every now and then, but she would remain in her seat throughout the service, making a show of not praying or singing. It began to draw stares from others in the congregation - so much so that it embarrassed me. After a while, I began to get flak from other kids and their parents about my mother's odd behavior in church. Then, one day, Mom just stopped going.
To this day Mom has never answered me directly about why she did this, or why she took us to church or continued to allow my brothers and me to go if she really didn't believe in it. I can only conclude that she took us because my father, a Catholic who later became a Methodist, insisted. But despite this religion-confusion, I kept attending church even when the rest of the family stopped going. I loved singing in the choir and despite my mother's rantings, I believed in God. I grew up questioning the Bible and everything about religion, and for a while, I even stopped attending when I reached my twenties. However, I could never bring myself to let go of God completely. No matter how confused I was, God remained in the back of my mind, guiding me throughout my troubled years and getting me back on an even keel by the time I reached my mid-thirties and my own kids were questioning me about religion and government.
In grade-school, I was taught some things that proved to be universal truths. These included that the N-word was a very, very bad thing to say, (as was any disgusting euphemism) and I was also taught to think of people as people - to disregard their skin color. I still hold these values to this day. However, as the late 70s gave way to the 80s, I noticed a profound change in school curriculum, and along with the fights I had with my mother over church, and I began to question the school system as well.
Why was there an African-American club and a Hispanic Club? How come it was suddenly not okay to talk about Christ at school anymore? Why am I supposed to feel guilty because I happen to look white? In English class, I was taught political correctness and that there are certain terms and phrases you cannot say because we might offend someone if we do say them. I agreed with it, believed in it and thus PC became an integral part of my verbal lexicon. By 1981, the Progressives were already injecting their doctrines of Socialism and Communism into our education system, and I bought it all. I fervently believed in everything the current Democratic party stood for, until I grew up and went to college. That's when I began to realize just how warped the liberal mindset truly is when it comes to the economy. What I couldn't get past, however (and wouldn't for many years) is that I still believed that all conservatives were inherently racist.
I have my opinions on the Mexico/US border dilemma, which I've already expressed in a number of posts & commentaries all over the web, so I won't go into a spiel on that now. I know that I got in trouble when I came out in support of it and was accused of being a racist. Even before that, the questions lingered. Suffice it to say that during the presidential primaries, it finally hit me that Democrats themselves were racist. It wasn't overt, like you'd find in Aryan groups and such, but it's the kind that's just swimming around below the surface like a copperhead snake, striking only when it's necessary and convenient for them to do so. I saw how Team Obama slapped Hillary Clinton and all the other candidates with the race card. It shocked me so much that I began to read up on this "thing" called Multiculturalism, as well as the Cult of Personality while trying to figure out how Obama could get away with this rhetoric and no one - NO ONE - in the Democratic Party or the media was questioning him about it.
Trust me when I tell you that most average Liberals (Progressives, Socialists, and so on) truly do not see themselves and what they are doing as "racist" or hypocritical. They honestly believe that multiculturalism is a celebration of diversity and to speak out against it is tantamount to putting on a KKK hood and burning crosses on people's front lawns. They believe that conservatives are stupid because we just don't "get it." But having seen this kind of dogma being spoon-fed to kids in public schools and then reinforced later on in college, I can also tell you that the intellectual Progressives like my mother know exactly what they're doing. They know it's hypocritical. They simply do not care what this kind of thinking does to the American Public because they have an agenda, which is to realize their Socialist utopia in this country, whatever that might be. To accomplish these things, I finally realized, they had to divide and conquer the minds of the American people. The masses. I also realized with quite a bit of horror that this has been going on right under our noses in one form or another in our public schools since the 1960s.
What are kids being taught? In order for the socialist agenda to be furthered in this day and age, you have to maintain the illusion that there is Oppressed and their Oppressor. Kind of like God Vs. Satan. There always has to be a "bad guy," and for the last 30 years, the "bad guy" just so happened to be all conservatives and all White People in general. In the average Progressive's mind, the Tea Party is actually seen as the last dregs of this supposed Oppressor/Aryan Nation mindset gathering together for one final stand before the evil conservative capitalists are wiped out completely. They believe this without question.
This hypocritical close-mindedness is inherent in every liberal. I had to consciously question every thing I saw to even begin to grasp it on my own. It took an accidental viewing of the Glenn Beck show in August of '09 to get me to understand the big picture. The problem, as I see it, is that most liberals don't bother to question anything coming from the media. They're comfortable with their mindset and see no reason to look at it any closer. The intellectual elite feeding this mindset know this and will not tolerate anyone who decides to ask a few too many questions.
These Progressive intellectuals, who supposedly know what's "best for us," knowingly use the ideals of Multiculturalism to get people to divide themselves into racial groups. Since these Progressive elites are very familiar with the social dynamics of certain racial groups (taught in every high school and college as "Humanities" courses), they know the right things to say to inflame these groups whenever it's called-for. The anti-SB1070 hype in Arizona is a prime example. The sad thing is that once divided by race, people simply close their minds and will not listen to any dissenting opinion or reasoning. These people are being played, and they either don't know or simply don't care. They have become ensnared in the trap of Multiculturalism completely and it will take nothing short of the lifting of bedrock Progressive principles to show people the ugly stuff squirming beneath to even begin to make them change their minds. Even at fifteen, something about political correctness and dividing people and labeling with race-hyphens stuck in my craw. But again, it took me years upon years of questioning the status quo to make me realize exactly what was going on. "Labeling" people is what Progressives do, and it has a very ugly and nefarious purpose, despite its outward humanitarian appearance.
Multiculturalism is nothing more than the 1950s ideal of "Separate but Equal," but it's been repackaged into a more sleek and modern design that is palatable for the general population. The underlying message became "Let's celebrate diversity with diversification!" It took me until 2008 to realize just how insidious and pervasive this mind-set was. Liberals of all stripes believe in it without question. When you challenge the idea of multiculturalism with an average liberal, be prepared for blow-back. You have to remember that you're fighting two generations of public school & college-level Progressive indoctrination. The idea of true equality and a "color blind" mode of thought is an alien concept to them because they think they're already doing it by championing diversity. This is the great fallacy of Multiculturalism.
In recent months, I am heartened by the growing number of black and Hispanic conservatives standing up and speaking out. I am glad that these communities are finally now beginning to see that true equality can only happen when we stop considering someone's race when we judge them as a person. People should be judged first and foremost by their motives and actions. My dad always used to tell me, "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then chances are pretty damned good that you're looking at a duck."
So, if you want to open the eyes of liberals, and by this I mean the average man-on-the-street liberal, you have to get them to begin by pointing out the hypocrisy in THEIR TERMS, thus allowing them to come to their own conclusions. This transition, I suppose, was easier for me because I've always harbored unanswered questions about liberal thought, which were finally answered for me when I went to work in the media and saw the Democrats' bully tactics in the last presidential primaries. But what about the rest of the libs out there?
In recent weeks, the subject has come up in public discourse that Planned Parenthood has been silently and deliberately exterminating blacks and Hispanics over the years via abortion clinics being placed in poor neighborhoods. This truth is finally resonating with these communities. Their ears are perked and they're growing more and more willing to listen to conservative opinion. What's also resonating is the message that is only just now getting out there that minorities have been "enslaved" by the Welfare system for many years now, blunting the minds of the young and stifling all but the brightest of those who want a better life. Many eyes are in the process of being opened, slowly but surely, especially by terrific people like Allen West, Herman Cain and others like them who get out in these communities and keep hammering away on this subject.
Unless a liberal can be led to question their own belief system, it is very hard to get them to change their minds. I've printed out reams of articles proving to my mother that Margaret Sanger was supportive of the idea of the extinction of black people. Regardless of this proof, Mom refuses to see it. Sanger was one of her heroes. Some minds, you just can't change. One can only hope that if we keep putting honest and truthful information out there that is contrary to what the liberal establishment has come to accept, maybe it will happen in time to save this country.
The main battle against Progressive ideals is already being waged within in our public schools. Progressives and union Socialists have a strangle-hold on our schools. As parents and grandparents, we need to start influencing our school boards to take up a more conservative-based curriculum. Teach kids the ugly yet honest truth about American history and world history, letting them draw their own conclusions. Even if Progressivism is finally rooted out of our schools one fine day, sooner or later, someone will discover Karl Marx again and think it's a smashing idea that everyone else should know about. I think Marxist materials should be used in schools but only as examples of what we SHOULD NOT DO, accompanied with comprehensive explanations as to WHY.
I think Rudyard Kipling said it best in "Gods of the Copybook Headings" (which I read many years before I ever heard of Glenn Beck, by the way):
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four and the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
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Have a nice day!
Jill
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Edit: Morton fixed some typos for me - thanks Morton!
The original article can be found here on FreedomTorch.
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