posted April 14, 2010 08:33 AM         

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
(Joni Mitchell)

There are moments when life crashes down on you like a thunderbolt. And ready or not, you change.

There's a before and an after. One moment, you're one way. And then, in the blink of an eye, you're different.

An instant before my parents died, I still felt like a child, though I was knee-deep in middle age. But when they passed, three weeks apart, suddenly I grew up...just like that.

While that experience was seismic, it doesn't compare to my sea change upon Obama's ascension. One minute I was a leftist, despising this country and all it stood for.

And then, abruptly and astonishingly, I became a conservative.

I had been enamored of progressivism, socialism, all the other "isms." But when Obama came on the scene and liberals starting acting like maniacs, I viewed the underbelly of the Left.

And that was it. In the blink of an eye, I saw that liberalism had rotted away. In time, I discovered that progressivism was a bogus idea to begin with.

The Left had captivated me with its grandiose schemes. It was a no-brainer to believe that humans -- that is, educated, erudite, city folks -- could perfect the world.

And now, two years into recovery, I'm still waking up from the world's worst hangover. Each day, I shake my head in wonderment: "What in the world was I thinking?"

Each day, I'm sucker-punched by the people whom I had trusted -- the Nancy Pelosis and Obamas of the world. I thought that Leftists were mini-messiahs who would save me. They are, in fact, "power-hungry, delusional demigods," as Mark Levin put it so pithily.

And the most recent aftershock: ObamaCare. It's horrifying that the Left would ram this law through against the expressed will of the American people.

Our Founding Fathers would be incredulous to see who we've become. Our government resembles the monarchy that they fought hard to escape.

We've become a country with little humility or honor. We're a place of demands and gripes and gimme-gimme.

Illegals demand citizenship, aggrieved groups demand "justice," and millions want something for nothing.

With all this hollering and demanding, it matters little how this power is amassed. If the Constitution is trashed, if the working person is bled dry, so what? The nation is engaged in one big, collective temper tantrum.

Out of this moral abyss comes Obama. No ordinary Democrat like Bill or Hillary or the Johns (Kerry and Edwards) would do. It had to be someone like Obama.

Raised by morally deficient people, Obama was spotted and groomed early on. The Left's movers and shakers recognized Obama's potential. They simply observed how Obama behaved in Chicago -- for instance, his seamless alliance with the corrupt slumlord Tony Rezko.

Obama force-feeds the public a cornucopia of leftist schemes. If he skirts the Constitution or dispatches SEIU thugs, that's okay by him.

With the radicals in charge of the henhouse, I should be dancing in the streets. I should be all Vive la Revolution.

But a funny thing happened on my way to the revolution. That lightning bolt hit, and I changed forever.

And now I see that that progressivism is simply children acting out, thumbing their noses at Mommy and Daddy and God Himself. This explains the perpetual temper tantrums and the lost, vacant looks.

While kids are naturally self-centered, when adults behave this way, they're narcissists. Growing up means no longer placing oneself at the center of the universe.

It requires facing the facts: This existence is unfair and imperfect. No human being, no matter how charismatic, can change the nature of reality.

A few years before my parents died, I decided to let go of the resentment that I had been carrying. First, I threw away all of my journals that detailed childhood injustices.

Then I sat down and wrote each of my parents a letter of appreciation. In doing so, I chucked my protracted grievances, the resentments that had formed my identity.

The letters must have meant a lot to my parents. Even though they disliked saving anything, the letters were among their possessions after they passed away.

There's another thank-you letter I should have penned years ago -- to the United States, a country I have failed to appreciate for most of my life.

Here goes:

Dear America:

Thank you for allowing a fresh start to my immigrant grandparents, so dirt poor in Russia that my starving grandmother would cry at the sight of bread in a store window.

Thank you for the American Dream, so I could travel across the country and start anew in California.

Thank you for the countless opportunities, like being able to attend graduate school.

Thank you for the many freedoms, such as the ability to protest and malign you.

I apologize for denigrating you for so many years.

This is my belated letter of thanks to the country I have grown to cherish. It's a love letter of sorts. I pray that it isn't a eulogy.

posted April 14, 2010 09:01 AM         

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.

Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological -- something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did many years before.

I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").

The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.

I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice, lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention.

Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.

When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'" too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.

My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table.

I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.

Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics.

Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day.

All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.

These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that."

When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."

I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators. Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice for "all of God's children."

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.

In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders' talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.

America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.

At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society (whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to "foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe."

One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary hometown.

This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.