A recap...

The old blog has been pretty heavy lately - I promise I'll get to lighter stuff soon enough, but for now let's recap...

I grew up a liberal in Berkeley California - and I was always taught to think for myself and question authority.  Unfortunately when I actually started doing so - I got shouted down, called names, lost friends - I was basically ostracized by many who had once told me to speak my mind.  Thankfully my close friends all stuck by me.

As I got through college and then out into the  real world, traveling to over 30 different countries, many of them 3rd world, as a camera operator and working with various charitable organizations - I became more and more convinced that a capitalist free market system was the only salvation for the planet; I also recognized that I lived in the greatest country on earth.

Over a decade I was transformed from a statist liberal - into a fiscal conservative and pro-military hawk, though still with quite a few liberal tendencies on social issues.

My true friends and of course my family, almost all of whom are liberal - still love me, we just don't talk politics.  But far too many acquaintances on the left that I encounter these days are super fast on the draw with the "r" word - racism, which is laughable to me and has lost all meaning.

I have also been called "evil" and "a bad person" on lil' old facebook.  I have been summarily de-friended by many who I assume have been unable to support their arguments and have been beaten up pretty bad by my unrelenting principles and beliefs.

But I don't bear any one of them ill will, and I don't believe a single one of them to be bad people.  They are simply lost - and ignorant of the real world.  Me, I've seen it first hand; I get it... not from some book or some socialist professor; I've dealt with it, poverty and real injustice in my face.  But the world is a big and complicated place and it demands logic and critical thinking, not emotional, reactionary rhetoric.

I pray on a regular basis that those without faith, those without a compass, those who are lost in their own anger and fear - will someday see the light.  That they can recognize that we are indeed put on this earth to help one another, but we must be on guard against the false compassion and the power hungry tyranny that threatens to bust forth in the name of "social justice" or being "fair"from the left.

You cannot legislate morality and you cannot insure that the world is "fair" from a political office.  You can only simply do your best to serve the people by insuring that they keep their freedom and individual liberty.  Only by this basic tenet will we all have the best chance to prosper; there is no quick fix, no miracle cure for greed in the human heart.  You cannot pass laws, draw up regulations, that will right every single wrong or insure a utopia.  

The best approach is, and always will be - to have faith in the creator and preserve as much personal liberty to the individual as we all can stand.  Only then, will we even have a remote chance at heaven on earth.