A Thought about Conservatives

2//5/05

In Emerson’s great series of essays, Conduct Of Life, his essay on Fate states this about conservatives: “All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.”

On the grand design of nature and the divine order, Emerson is one of America’s greatest thinkers and most respected writers. His relevance and concepts are absolutely timeless. One can only imagine what he would have to say about the conservative pundits and think tanks of today and if he were alive and writing today what the Conservative media would be saying about him. I’m certain the majority of the media have never read Emerson, just as they have read none of the writings of the great liberal thinkers of our American heritage, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt and so many others.

Ignorance is bliss. That is the motto of most conservatives. They think what their parents thought, or do not think at all, or they think what they are told to think by their government or priest or preacher or teacher without inquiry or investigation as to the origin of fact or fiction. They dread the pains of industry it takes to think for themselves. They prefer to parrot the clichés and actions of the” damned generations” calling them great and noble, these generations of slavery, segregation, monopolies, world wars, massive poverty and imperil tyranny; rather than listen, read and cherish the wisdom of the true sages, who combated the blindness, stupidity and selfishness of dynasties and conservative governments and societies to bring about social reforms under free, liberal governments.

The greatest horror facing America is the possibility of Emerson’s works and the work of other great liberal thinkers becoming banned from schools and purged from the history of the American people. Conservative ignorance got Charles Darwin expelled from grade school science, will Thomas Jefferson be purged from American History classes? Ralph Waldo Emerson already has been expelled, even the brilliant revolutionary works of Christ have been perverted and edited into the ignorant ranting of evangelical cult leaders of the Christian right, who call their followers to a false heaven through the malevolent manipulation of fear and faith. Christ’s teachings are with us because of courageous, far thinking, open minded people who preserved his works and recorded his teachings throughout the Roman persecutions of the early Christians and through the dark ages of barbarians, who burned and plundered all civilizations and made slaves of the conquered people. The extreme consevativism we now face in America is this same barbarism, the same brutal force and ignorance that burns books, humiliates liberal ideals and destroys all dignity in the advancements of mankind, by viewing the world as its enemy, rather than open their closed minds to ideas of peace, compassion and the goal of human and planetary perfection worthy of eternal reward , rather than eternal damnation.

L.A.Steel