By Dana R. Casey
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
In the late 1970s, I went to an experimental high school.
Most of the students were some form of nature-loving hippie. Not the raw,
shocking, and rude kind of the true hippie era, more of the granola-eating,
yogurt-making, calico-and-work-boot-wearing kind, but still dabbling in some
risky sex and drugs.
These hippies were mostly the children of wealthy
progressive parents who had purchased immense Roland Park mansions with their
trust funds and who raised their children by the most progressive paradigms.
Most of the rest were rock-n-roll drug addicts. A few of us, children of
working-class parents attending the school on scholarship, were a little closer
to normal. I came from an educated working-class family, and am daughter of a
public-school teacher.
I remember some of the students sitting around one
afternoon talking about the beauty of Native Americans and their respect for
nature, recounting that, when the natives killed an animal, they first prayed
to thank gods, ancestors, or perhaps the animal itself. My schoolmates talked
about how the natives honored the animal they had killed by using every part,
wasting none: the meat for food, the skin for clothes, the bones for tools and
jewelry, the sinew for bindings and cords, and the hooves for rattles and
bells. I could feel the awe this inspired in my fellow classmates. They felt
enlightened, that a truth was revealed.
My First Encounter with Liberal Hypocrisy
The next morning, I brought a scrapple sandwich to school
for breakfast. A friend, who was indeed wearing a calico skirt with long johns
and work boots (although no deodorant) leaned over to me and asked, “What ’cha
eating?”
“Scrapple,” I replied.
“Eww! That’s disgusting! Do you know what they put in
that stuff?” Thus the Scrapple Theory was born to me at the tender age of 16.
For those of you who are not familiar with scrapple, it
is corn meal, ground pork, and spices baked in a loaf pan, cooled, sliced, and
fried in butter. It is often eaten with catsup, a nice sweet contrast to the
peppery spiciness. It is a true American specialty of the Pennsylvania Dutch.
It was originally made from “scraps” of pork (i.e., scrapple) left over from
butchering that could not be sold or used elsewhere, in order to avoid waste!
Perhaps you can see where I am heading. According to my
schoolmates, Native Americans who “honor” an animal by using all of its parts
are noble human beings in touch with nature. However, a good German peasant
(from whom the Pennsylvania Dutch originated) who makes use of the entire
animal is abhorrent and disgusting. This scrapple sandwich epiphany was one of
my first observations of ubiquitous liberal progressive hypocrisy.
I began to see that if an act, religion, or tradition
comes out of Western European and American culture, it is something to
ridicule, to looked down upon as backward or oppressive. If it comes from other
world cultures like China, India, Africa, or even pre-Columbian America, it is
admirable and deep, something to imitate. Buddhist prayer beads are wonderfully
spiritual, but a rosary is a symbol of fascist misogynist oppression. It is a
xenophilic rather than xenophobic intolerance, a hatred of your own culture.
This has become such a part of the cultural norm that it has evolved into the
white self-hatred becoming so pervasive today.
Not long after the scrapple theory was born, I got a ride
from yet another trust-fund hippie in his mother’s hand-me-down Volvo station
wagon to a concert at Goucher College. He told me that life would be so cool if
we could have anarchy in the country. Then people could do whatever they
wanted. The effing “pigs” and “the effing man” would have no control. Already
knowing the real consequences of anarchy, I said, “Don’t you realize that you
would be one of the first people slaughtered, that the people who were no
longer controlled by ‘the pigs’ would steal your stuff?” He looked dumbfounded,
and knew that I was no longer as cool as he had thought.
Sitting on the Fence
Now I was still young and new to serious political
debate, but I was raised in a political family. The news was always on in the
morning and evenings. My parents discussed the current issues of the day at the
dinner table, but I was still learning. For the next 17 years through the late
1970s into the 1980s, I studied and worked in the arts and theater. There I was
surrounded by the enlightened ones who knew that everything liberal was good
and everything conservative was evil. After all, President Nixon was not that
far in the past (although Nixon now looks junior varsity next to the
scandal-ridden houses of Clinton and Obama).
I was sure that I was on the side of good, but I still
had a feeling of unease. I would read books like J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in
the Rye,” Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and Carlos Castaneda’s “The Teachings
of Don Juan,” expecting the illuminating awakenings my friends professed, but
the books always fell flat. I just didn’t get it. I wondered what was wrong
with me. It turns out that there was little to get. The books were crap.
But I also read the theology of C.S. Lewis and George
McDonald, the fiction of Ayn Rand and Elizabeth Gouge, the classics like “The
Histories” by Herodotus, “Confessions” by Augustine, and the philosophies and
plays of the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. And my faith was strong; it was a
constant, and I went through bouts of church-going that irritated my liberal
friends to no end. They actually said to me, “How can someone as intelligent as
you believe in nonsense like that, especially Catholic dogma?” Ironically, they
believed in runes, tarot cards, psychics, the supernatural, séances, auras, and
every other idiot mystical fad that came around.
I waffled between being conservative and liberal. My
first presidential votes were for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, followed by a
series of votes for independents and libertarians, because I could stand none
of the choices the two main parties offered. Even though I didn’t think of
myself as conservative, through the years I would get into arguments with
liberal friends about taxes and big government, welfare and food stamps, double
standards and affirmative action. Usually, they completely disagreed with me.
Liberal Policies Reward Bad Choices
In one instance, I discussed abortion with a fellow
waitress and the bookkeeper at a very hip restaurant where I worked. I said that
I was not sure how I felt, that I saw why people wanted to keep it legal, but
that it also made me very uneasy that it might be taking a life. My fellow
waitress reverted to the now-familiar liberal outraged and offended scream,
which is something like the body snatchers from the 1978 sci-fi classic.
“WhaaaAATTT!!! Are you in-SANE!!!! You’re a WO-MAN!!!!” There was no further
use in continuing the conversation after that. I shut up.
In another instance, one liberal friend earned a teaching
degree on scholarship, but found teaching just too taxing. She had received the
scholarship because she was a single divorced mother living on welfare. She
quit teaching and went back on welfare instead. While on welfare, she owned
multiple properties she rented out and a bank account into which she funneled
thousands. She spent most of her days playing with her children.
Another friend had three children with a man she didn’t
marry until after the third. He was abusive, which she knew quite well before
she had her second and third child, and she eventually had to leave him. She
lived in her mother’s house for free. She also received welfare and food
stamps. Then she also went to university for nothing, while I was going on
student loans and working full time to support myself.
I stayed with her for a short period when I was going
through a particularly hard stretch. I was grateful for her generosity of a
free room. One day, she came back from the grocery store irate. The store had a
sale on hot, freshly steamed shrimp. She ordered two pounds and went to the
checkout line, where she was told that she could not buy hot food with food
stamps. She was welcome to get some fresh uncooked shrimp and steam them
herself, but free fresh shrimp paid for by the working people of America was
not good enough for her. She told me, “People on food stamps deserve luxuries,
too.”
Much to her chagrin, I responded, “No, they don’t. They
deserve to eat, and they should be grateful for that.” My friend was not very
happy with me.
Later, while I was struggling to support myself and
finish my undergraduate degree, she went on to get her master’s, also for free.
We both started teaching at around the same time, but she got paid much more
because she already had a master’s degree, a degree that I could not afford,
and she had no student loans to pay off.
I started to see that liberal policies rewarded poor
choices, while penalizing those who worked hard, didn’t get pregnant as a teen,
and were responsible for taking care of oneself. It really ticked me off.
Little by little, I was starting to see that liberalism was hypocritical and
destructive while conservatism actually promoted individual freedom,
self-reliance, laws applied equally and fairly to each individual, and limited
government. These were ideas I thought liberals, particularly hippie-type
liberals, actually believed. I was mistaken.
Public Schools Reinforce Rather than Correct Poor
Behavior
Then I started teaching in a Baltimore City Public High
School, one of the worst. It was shut down not long after I began teaching
there. Low expectations, both academic and behavioral, shocked me at first.
There was no structure in place to assist teachers with disruptive students.
Students were rarely held to basic etiquette standards, so raising a hand
before talking or not using foul language regularly in the classroom were not
norms and difficult to establish.
Homework was obsolete. Parents whom I called about their
misbehaving children told me that they hadn’t been able to control their
children since the kids were 12 or 13. They often told me not to bother them
anymore. Some parents cared very much, but the hectic atmosphere of the school
worked against anyone learning. Daily attendance was around 50 percent. The freshman
class was 400, and the senior class was around 100 with only 75 graduating at
the end of the year.
At the end of my first year teaching, I failed one of my
seniors. She had done little of the work, she had a fourth-grade reading level,
and she did not truly know the difference between a dedication page in “Island
of the Blue Dolphins” and a character list in a play. I had tried to work with
her all year, but she was absent more than present.
The entire administration and college advisor begged me
to pass her. Their reasoning was that if I did not pass her, she would refuse
to go to summer school and then she would never graduate. I had to pass her, or
I would ruin her whole life. Did she deserve to have her life ruined, I was
asked? I told them that they could do what they wanted, but I would have
nothing to do with it. She graduated; she still wasn’t functionally literate.
The Truths I Can Never Un-See
My understanding of liberal versus conservative slowly
started to shift. Like one of those optical illusions where there are two
images in one, once I started to see the second image, I could not un-see it.
Sometimes the second image becomes primary and the first is no longer visible.
In the article “Things You Cannot Un-see (and What They Say about Your Brain),”
Alexis C. Madrigal writes, “People report this kind of thing all the time, and
they use this same phrase: cannot un-see. Someone points out something and
suddenly a secondary interpretation of an image appears. There’s something a
little scary about this process, even when the images are harmless. We have a
flash of insight and a new pattern is revealed hiding within the world we
thought we knew. It surprises us.” That’s a duck. NO—it’s a rabbit!
For me, it was “that’s a compassionate and good liberal
policy” becomes “that’s a policy of destructive collectivism and government
overreach.” Nothing brought this more clearly to light for me than observing
the destructive practices and policies implemented at our public schools and in
our inner cities. Policies that claim to help but almost always cause
irreparable harm: welfare that destroys the black family, school busing that
ruins a once-thriving school system that often served even the poorest students
well, taxation and regulation that drives out business which take with them
jobs that provided a decent living even for not-well-educated citizens, middle-
and working-class neighborhoods that become rat-ridden slums. Everyone loses.
Once I started to see, I realized that I was never really
a liberal, but always a conservative, a believer in self-reliance, individual
freedom, small government, and individual equality of opportunity. Once I
started to see, I could not go back. I could not un-see.
So many Americans in this country are liberal and
Democrat just because that is what they have always been, and this political
stance is presented as the only intelligent and humane stance one can have—but
they don’t live life like liberals. They are for family and against abortion,
they want jobs, not handouts, they believe that capital punishment is sometimes
necessary, they want to have the right to own guns to protect their family, and
they want government out of their schools, churches, and homes. If we can get
them to see, they too will not be able to un-see, and we might just restore
America.
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