I was a liberal, but then I grew up....

True Story, written my me in my life.

When I was 15-16 I was your classic liberal, even though I had a small business in High school. Nobody should go without food, medical, a house, some good things in life.

First I had to go to war (and see what REAL oppression and poverty were), Then I had to EARN the money to support myself and two children all by myself, go to college, and work at the same time. Sleep was a rarity. By the time I was 26, I learned other people would eat off of my plate for free, take my lunch in taxes from honest hard working people. While I took care of myself and two children, others took welfare, didn't work, did drugs and alcohol. I became a conservative, IE being half way grown up. Then in my 30s, I saw the same people I had to support in my 20's, still free lunching the system with my taxed dollars, still running for free, and aided and shared that money with government.

Then my wake up call. I got a traffic ticket that I considered unfair. I fought it, but lost even though it was clear that I did not do what the citation I was accused of. The judge said something I will not forget. He fined me double what the fine was if I had just paid it, and he said "well, you made the court be bothered for you, and somebody has to pay our salaries" ??? At that point, a defining moment, I became a libertarian and a nationalist and a supporter of the second amendment. I figured out the long term plan for American, and knew we needed to be armed. I began to understand what our founding fathers were trying to convey when they wrote the constitution, and how our current government is trying to destroy it for their own profit. I GREW UP, and began to under stand the whole constitutional and textual meaning of the constitution under a new light. I began studying law and history, and began to see what the constitution said, and what and how it was applied. I want and earned a masters in military history to add to my Mechanical Engineering degree I worked so hard for. I began to understand our government, and the swamp it had began to resemble.

Now I am 68, and am still a libertarian and a nationalist. I understand defensive wars and the price of them due to me being drafted and sent over as cannon fodder for Lyndon Johnson's career and the arms industry. It is clear now to me where we are headed as a nation that has a huge military, but cannot defend our borders, and where we are going, I have only fear and pity for my grandchildren.

Trump is just a bump in the road to our destruction as a nation by the liberals. As Oprah said, they cannot wait for my generation to die off, the old guard of experience in life must be moved out of the way so they can return to the past of slavery and hate.

 

As soon as I read that I said, not2serious most be a Vietnam Vet.

I have a similar experience.

Welcome home not2serious.

 

Thank you, but I was drafted, I did not sign up by choice.

 

How do you know the Judge wasn't a Libertarian

 

Grats on surviving. I spent half my childhood in India, living in literal **** and almost dying countless times from diseases while scrounging for food and potable water all on my own.

Still a liberal.

Having a hard knock life doesn't make you a conservative.

What makes you a conservative is having a massive chip on your shoulder and a desperate need to feel superior to someone, anyone else.

 

He used the power of his position to extort money from the proletariat.

I found out the sheriff of Nottingham was not dead. He has been reincarnated all over our nation within the government lawyer class.

 

So you believe in theft and against ownership of private property (I assume). Perhaps you are still welfare it today? I COULD have chosen to cry, fall down, kick my feet and be slaves of other people, but what didn't kill me, made me stronger. You apparently, learned nothing from your experience. Your growth was stunted.

And now, America will soon resemble your growing up period in the same way, totally destitute and corrupt.

 

What is actually destroying this nation is open borders slave labor neoliberal globalism. Thanks to both political parties. It originated within the GOP, but thanks to clinton the DP joined them in this neoliberalism which led to cents on the dollar globalism, the exploitation of the world's poor. By neoliberalism.

 

If you were a real man, you'd become a sovereign citizen. Libertarians are nothing more then sovereign lite.

 

Yes, and you are correct. The only thing stopping it from happening is the election of Trump. Can you imagine the criminality and corruption in government if Bill and Hillary got back in the white house? But Oprah was right, when our generation dies off, so will what is left of the countries good life. Illegal aliens and their supporters will destroy the very thing that brought them here. It is sad. My race in life is nearly run, and the globalist and 1984 WILL come to pass.

 

Nah, just growing up will do it.

I was a lib in my twenties but I grew up too.

 

I am too old to worry about being a "real man". The younger generations will never become a sovereign citizens, they will become slaves. One thing in studying history and law, it that human nature never changes. If you look at what is happening in England now, how they got the guns, and now the people are becoming slaves again. One guy thrown in jail for letting the people know what was going on in the courts with child grooming and rape. This unfortunately, is the future of American. Sad, is it not?

At least I had a chance to grow up, and see what is happening. It will be too late for people like you, you will pay the price of slavery and exploitation. Mark my words, 20 years we will be where Britain is. I will probably be dead.

 

What made me a conservative was realizing government was not the answer. In most cases, it was the problem.

"The government that governs least, governs best" ... Thomas Jefferson

 

Yes, that is what happened to me when I was found guilty of a traffic ticket I was clearly not guilty of. It was simply a "sheriff of Nottingham thing, so I would pay their wages to leach off of me.

 

You're absolutely right about that. Being smart enough to learn from mistakes, whether they're your own or others' is what wakes you up to a more conservative ideology. Sadly, you don't seem to be the type that learned anything, at all, from your circumstances.

 

Growing up in a place with a well defined caste system is probably not the best way to become a conservative. It's certainly not the hard knock life, but rather the belief in yourself as a person. When you have that pride in yourself and your ability to survive in a meritocracy competing with others, then you learn that it's not feeling superior, but rather behaving in a superior fashion. It's about having morality on your side, and that will make you strong.

You won't get that strength and pride by being poor and caring what other people think of you.

 

I'm not far behind you my friend. Guess i'll have to miss out on it as well.

 

Yeah, the future is pretty obvious. The good news is that this is just part of a cycle.

My awakening from the stupor of socialism/communism that my parents taught me about came from actually experiencing things that my parents never did. They taught me that racism is bad, and that the only reason blacks were poor is because of a "system" that kept them from becoming wealthy. So anyway, I had to work my way through university working for a general contractor. I moved to black neighborhood because that's where the rents were cheapest. I got to see first hand how everything I had been taught was true in a sense, but false in another sense. I was living in what used to be a very wealthy neighborhood. It had beautiful victorian mansions side-by-side with government housing units. Those people who had built the mansions had long since moved out, and blacks had moved in.

If what I had been taught was true, then why weren't these blacks profiting now? The dirt was the same, the geographical location the same, but they were poor nonetheless. The reason they didn't care is because they hadn't worked for it. They were either renting (like me) at dirt poor prices, or having it handed to them by the government.

My boss had a big job restoring a house up in the hills, and needed to find some people that would do the job. He was paying 100 bucks a day for unskilled labor, providing transportation to and from the job, and lunches were on him. This was in the early 80s, and 100 bucks for 8 hours of honest labor was a pretty good gig. All he expected was that you give him an honest day.

I couldn't find one person in my neighborhood who would take the job. Hell, my boss was so desperate, he went to a soup kitchen and asked guys in line if they wanted a job. Nope! Not a soul wanted to work on a roof swinging a hammer.

Where was all of this systemic racism? I couldn't see it. All I saw were poor people who were adamant on being poor. The once beautiful neighborhood I was living in was now going to seed. While drug dealers made money on the sidewalk, paint was peeling on the walls. While yards that could have easily been producing vegetables were filled with garbage, young mothers were waiting for the government to give them food for their babies. Through it all, all I heard were complaints about racism and the man keeping them down.

Traveling overseas taught me what real poverty is. Young kids working from dusk to dawn collecting recyclable materials from garbage cans, or maybe scrambling for spilled rice in the dirt of a rice merchant's stall, and sniffing glue to ward off hunger pangs was real poverty. That was a far cry from those lazy-good-for-nothing "poor" from my old neighborhood.

The good news is that this is a cycle, and places that are now poor will become rich, and places that are rich will become poor. The only problem is that socialists eat their own, so they're like a societal cancer. China was once rich, then Mao made them poor. The Korean peninsula used to be one, but now they are two, and the difference between them is obvious enough for anybody to see. Cuba was once rich, and it will be rich again, once the parasite has consumed the host.

Sure, Trump is a mere speed bump in the road towards eventual degradation. My forefathers came from Europe because of cancer there, and now there's a cancer here. There is nothing particularly different from the dirt that was there and the dirt that is here, and the same is as true today as it was back in the day. Detroit was once a wealthy city, and the Philippines used to be considered the pearl of the Orient. California was once a hard place to earn a living (the gold and silver rush only made a few people rich, but most worked hard for little), and it's now becoming a hard place to earn a living again. Cambodia once had a mighty empire that built Angkor Wat, and now it's slowly trying to turn things around after Pol Pot's short but bloody reign of terror. The same is true of Russia. They're fighting back, and I hope they make it. The Colosseum in Rome has seen this cycle many times already, and the Pyramids of Giza have, as well.

It's just a cycle that we have seen throughout history, and the cancer consumes the host until it dies, leaving behind a good place to work hard and raise a family.

 

Actually, being a patriot and loving this nation makes you a conservative. People noticed; which is why the Left have steadily been losing power and influence in this nation since 2010.

 

This was the case with me, too, but I matured a bit earlier, before my 21st birthday.

I think this is common; liberals/progressives/socialists realize this, hence their efforts to keep young adults immature and dependent on, if not mom and dad, the government...

 

In the real world, people tend to get more liberal as they age. That's expected. As one matures and gains experience in the real world, they develop better BS detectors, so they reject conservatism.

https://www.livescience.com/2360-busting-myth-people-turn-liberal-age.html

I understand how that works. I was conservative. I grew out of it, and escaped that victimhood cult. I'm here as a message of hope to those still trapped in the nightmare of conservatism, to demonstrate that it's never too late to throw off the chains.

 

There is an old adage that applies to this. When you are 25 if you are not a liberal you dont have a heart. When you are 65 if you are not a conservative you dont have a brain.

Forty years of living life and making a living is a great educator.

 

I think you have it all backwards there. Victimhood is the cesspool that liberals swim in.

 

A few of us who went from liberal to conservative explained some of the reasons we changed. What caused you to "grow out of it"?

 

Youth have not see the law of hard knocks. That is why they, like me, were easy prey at 15-17. We had not matured like our male brains do not stop growing until then. Youth is foolish, lacking the experiences of a lifetime like older people like me have had.