Part I: I am liberal; Part II: I am conservative

On my list of facebook friends, of course, are lots of my former students--quite a variety of now grown people. When one of them "went" on a rant about the issue of immigration the day Obama came to Nashville, I had to respond. Then when he began to demonize liberals, I had to respond again. As a matter of fact, here is my response.

The word liberal has been demonized, if words can be demonized, in the past decade or two by some group of people who don't quite know what they are talking about, but who definitely want to create "haters" in our country.

Just as with the words feminism and feminist back in the 70s and 80s, the word smiths have tried to make sure that the words liberal or liberalism connote all sorts of things that they do not connote!

According to the new updated edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the word liberal actually means "not limited to or by established, traditional, or authoritative views, attitudes, or dogma, free from bigotry, open to new ideas for progress, tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others, broad-minded, and generous." Further from the same source, liberalism is "a political theory founded on the natural goodness of humans and the autonomy of the individual and favoring civil and political liberties, and government by the law with the consent of the governed."

Guilty as charged, I am a liberal! About most things. I like to think that I am broad-minded and generous person who believes in the natural goodness of humans. Who doesn't want to think that of him/herself? I like to believe that I am tolerant of most everything (except of intolerance--I am definitely not tolerant of intolerance or of ignorance or of evil, to name a few things). Also I am definitely not a bigot and favor civil and political liberties!

What is really interesting to me is that when I went to find images of liberalism for this blog on the internet, most of the images were incredibly negative! The most common one was that "liberalism is a mental disease or disorder." As I've stated, someone is doing a really good job of demonizing the words liberal and liberalism. Some wordsmiths or spin doctors have been working hard to put a negative, evil spin on the words.

Some of my favorite people in life and in history have been liberals. They are people whom I admire and wish to emulate.  A former principal and supervisor of instruction of mine, Dr. Alvin Rose was one of these people, and he always said that he didn't see how a person could be a public school teacher and not be a democratic! Besides Alvin, I also admire Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Jesus, to name a few.

The above book is on my list of books that I want to read in 2015. Its preface was fascinating reading. Perhaps Santa will leave this book in my stocking!

Some of you may appreciate learning more about liberalism by watching the educational documentary Deflating the Elephant, available on Netflix and youtube. Another fascinating piece on the topic is Bill Moyers' interview with Johnathan Haidt, who wrote a book that I've recommended before entitled The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. 

Next week, I will write a blog post about conservatism. I look forward to doing some research on the subject and on seeing just what I am conservative about. See you later, dear reader.