How to Be a Liberal Activist (In 10 Easy Steps)

1) Find a grave injustice:

Can you claim the grave injustice affects a minority group to a greater extent than the general population? If not, pick again.

Is the grave injustice a result of the government taking away an individual's property or personal freedom? If so, pick again. 

2) Now that you've found your grave injustice, you will become a spokesperson for this group. Call attention to these once-proud individuals as victims. They are helpless without you.

3) Set up a commission or organization to study why this group has been victimized. Don't forget to include a salary and pension for yourself.

4) Find and publish the cause of said injustice - lack of funding. NOTE: The solution is always "more funding."

5) Suggest someone else pay to fix it. Go to the government.

6) Ask the government to fund a program for the victims. A couple hundred million dollars will do at this point. 

7) Watch your organization grow while the grave injustice fails to improve. Clearly, the solution is "more money". Ask for additional funding. Include a raise for yourself and a budget for nicer office digs. When the government points out that they are $15 trillion in debt, suggest raising taxes.

8) Defend your right to exist at all costs. If a fiscally minded conservative suggests cuts to your program (cuts being not actual cuts, but simply a refusal to increase funding), call them extremists who want to kill the poor and elderly. No matter how outrageous your claim sounds, it will be treated as reasonable by the mainstream media.

9) Watch injustice get worse despite success of funding by government. Start to use financial windfall to support candidates who promise you more money. For your victims, of course.

10) Repeat ad nauseam until the people wake up.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

No.


Okay. I'll expand on that. For a long period of time, most of the past forty years actually, Americans have been content to navigate our country's path one turn at a time. We arrive at each intersection, take a poll, look both ways, and at the last minute decide whether to go left or right. The problem with this navigational system is it never looks beyond the one obvious turn. The destination becomes arbitrary.

For once, it would be nice to know where we are headed. In looking at the bigger picture, two roads become apparent. The Left wants us to follow Europe. The Right wants us to stay truer to the vision of America's founders. It's not extreme, naive, or unreasonable to ask Americans to be less myopic and pick a path. But in doing so, we will surely become more divided as a nation. Whether we ultimately go Left or Right, the majority of the people will probably conform. It's only human nature to want to get along. But the more rights that are usurped by institutions on either side, the harder it becomes for the most passionate and outspoken to resolve our differences.

I write this because friends stop and ask me, "Jon, when did you become so ultra-conservative?" My answer is I didn't. I simply looked further down the road and picked the path to the destination that offered the most freedom.