Left and Right

You could call it the “Wayne’s World” of politics. Every other Wednesday, I go to the Valley Vision studio in North Conway, New Hampshire and argue politics for an hour with a liberal named Gino. We call the show “Left and Right” but I keep suggesting we call it “Right and Wrong” instead. Gino doesn’t agree. Each episode runs over and over in different time slots for two weeks until we tape another. Only people who subscribe to the local Time Warner Cable franchise can watch it on channel three, and we have no idea how many tune in. I think my mother would, but she has a satellite dish.

Gino and I are both political junkies who keep up on issues of the day. Each of us keeps notes on whatever is happening to bring up on the show, but I have an advantage: I used to be a liberal and I remember how I thought back then when I was young and foolish. Gino, however, was never a conservative. It would be accurate to say that I’m a personification of the adage: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re forty, you have no brain.”

Churchill's biographers say they can't find the quote, but someone said it.

The left/right dichotomy has strongly influenced my life for decades. When I was teaching in the public schools, my history textbooks were slanted liberal. I provided balance by offering a conservative point of view to contrast the book’s perspective. Lately I’ve been teaching a group of ten home-schooled, high school-age students in Auburn with whom I’m doing something I’ve always wanted to try: using both a liberal text and a conservative text, and assigning them readings on a particular period in history from two perspectives. Each student has “A People’s History of the United States” by the late Howard Zinn - a closet communist. They also have “A Patriot’s History of the United States” by Schweikart and Allen. I’ve got students only once a week for two hours, and we cannot cover too much in one year, but it’s very instructive to compare and contrast the two points of view. Authors of both books claim to be unbiased, but neither Zinn nor Schweikart, nor Allen are of course. Neither am I, but I try to be. No one is really, but we should keep our minds open.

When I started teaching in 1975, I was pretty far to the left. After dropping out of college in 1972, I worked with liberals in John Kerry’s failed congressional campaign in the Massachusetts 5th district that year. I also worked with “community organizer” disciples of Saul Alinsky and Noam Chomsky in Lowell, Massachusetts. After all that I went back to school to become a teacher and began my long metamorphosis from left to right. When I first started publishing columns in 1989, I was still straddling the fence. By about 1993, however, I had become a full-fledged conservative.

Around that time, I began publishing regular weekly columns for local newspapers in which I expressed my opinions without reserve. Many readers on the left assumed I taught my history classes the same way I wrote my columns. At first, they wrote letters to the editor suggesting I was unfit to teach and these were published frequently. Several leftists went further by trying to influence principals, superintendents, school boards, and state teacher licensing agencies to discipline me, silence me, or pull my teaching certification. By the time I retired, I had amassed quite a paper trail documenting their efforts.

For the past three years, I’ve been working on and off writing a book about this, being careful to get it all down as it happened. Last month, I thought, “Okay, I’m done. It’s all down there in black and white.” I printed it off, made some copies, and asked friends to read it with the condition that they be ruthless in their feedback. Well, that feedback is trickling in and I’m thinking maybe I’m not all done. Looks like I need to expand it. Some suggest I add more on what caused me to move from left to right. Others said it reads too much like “just the facts, ma’am” written by a detective or a reporter, and I need to put in more about what it felt like as events unfolded.

Then there’s the business of book publishing. It’s not like publishing columns, except that both are changing rapidly. The more I look into it, the more I realize how much I still have to learn. It looks like I may have been premature when I announced on the “Left and Right” show that my book about moving from left to right was finished. It was hard enough to get down what happened. Now I’m going to have to write about my feelings? That’s not something I’m used to or very good at either, but it appears to be still another thing I have to learn.

Left, Right, Forward March

It’s time again to tell readers that I wasn’t always a conservative-racist-homophobic-misogynist bigot. No. Back in the day people though I was a weirdo-hippie-commie-pinko-progressive. I worked with Saul Alinsky radicals and then for John Kerry’s 1972 congressional campaign. I believed poverty caused crime and people were poor only because other people were rich - and got that way by ripping off the poor. I believed in big government because it was the only way to counteract big corporations who were our real enemies. I believed government worked best when it played Robin Hood and spread the wealth around. If I hadn’t grown up, I’d probably be working for the Democrat Party or writing for some progressive think tank, and I’d likely have voted for Barack Obama twice. Ugh.

But I did grow up twenty years ago, and I’m embarrassed it didn’t happen sooner. What can I say? I was a late bloomer. The process began years earlier, but the transformation wasn’t complete until about 1994. So, I was a diehard lefty from about 1970 to about 1990 or so, then the transition, and for two decades since I’ve been the thoroughly conservative writer with whom you’ve become familiar on these pages. It hasn’t been helpful for my bottom line though. I would likely have progressed farther income-wise if I’d remained a lefty both in education and in writing columns, but I just didn’t believe in that world-view anymore and I couldn’t fake it.

What caused the change? Too many things to include here. My book goes into detail about the transformation and I’m past the halfway point writing it. I should be ready to shop it around to publishers come early summer. It compares how conservative critics treated me when I was a lefty teacher/writer to how lefty critics treated me when I became a conservative teacher/writer. The latter part is much longer though. It goes into depth about how various “tolerant” and “open-minded” liberal individuals and groups tried to get me dismissed or silenced. Book-publishing is a competitive business, but I believe readers will find my book interesting and I’m prepared to give my best effort when selling it to publishers.

As a committed conservative, the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012 discouraged me deeply. Most of my like-minded friends have since given up hope of a conservative resurgence, but I haven’t. “Look,” they say. “The left controls the media, education, the culture (Hollywood), most of the judiciary, the White House, and the Senate. What have we got? Talk Radio, Fox News, some churches, and the House. That’s it.” They’re correct in all that, I know, but I have more faith in the American people. My pessimistic friends expect the fed to keep printing money, government to keep spending it, the debt to keep increasing, more people to go on welfare, fewer workers and businesspeople to pay taxes - and for everything to go on like that until it all collapses. 

That could happen, I admit, and it could happen sooner rather than later. A lot of Americans have become dependent on government programs of one kind or another - even a majority by some counts. There are many “low-information voters” out there and their numbers will increase enormously if amnesty for illegal immigrants passes. It can get discouraging, no doubt, but I guess I believe in the common sense of Americans more than most of my conservative friends. Most of us know as some deep level that it just can’t go on like this. According to Rasmussen, two out of three Americans believe we’ve become too dependent on government. That would have to include people who are themselves dependent to one extent or another, but they know the government gravy train will go off the rails eventually. Not enough of them went to the polls in November of 2012, but that can change in the next two election cycles.

More and more Americans will be discovering this year what was in the Obamacare bill Democrats rammed through in 2009 and they won’t like it. I think it’s safe to say that most already don’t like it, but that number will reach critical mass sometime in 2014 as millions more lose their coverage and are forced onto the exchanges. Others who think they’ve already signed up will discover how much more Obamacare is costing them compared to what they had before its implementation.

We’re in for some economic and foreign policy shocks, but I expect Americans to survive them and smarten up in the process. They’ll learn that, as Margaret Thatcher put it: “The facts of life are conservative,” and vote accordingly. We’re in a deep hole, but I choose to believe we can still climb out of it.

Pounding The Keys Again

Lila and Claire

My life is getting back to normal lately. Two weeks ago my daughter and her family moved in with the other grandparents, Roger and Chris Lowell in Bridgton, until the addition on their own house is done. My wife and I are each going over there one day a week to help out, just as Roger and Chris did for us. Twins Henry and Luke will be five months old the end of July and are growing like weeds. Their older sister Claire will be four in September and Lila is two-and-a-half and both are adjusting to their baby brothers. Part of me misses seeing them every day, but I’m glad to have my life back too.

Luke, Henry and Annie

So, after a hiatus of five months, I’ve resumed my work on a book. It’s about years of efforts by leftist individuals and lobbying groups to censor, discipline or dismiss me when I was a teacher. Some expressed outrage at my conservative views as a columnist and claimed they made me unsuitable for the classroom. Others disapproved of lessons I taught in class on US History or current events involving Islamist terrorism, abortion, homosexuality, or other controversial issues. Occasionally I was able to obtain copies of their complaints. Some were fellow staff members, some were parents, community members, or people in various interest groups on the left who lobbied principals, superintendents, school boards, and state licensing agencies against me, and I’ve accumulated a file full. There’s an even thicker file of letters to the editor in papers which have published my column over the years insisting that anyone with opinions like mine isn’t fit to teach. There’s also a file of letters from students, parents and community members in my support - some private, and others which were published.

Then there are my own accounts of meetings with principals and superintendents as well as emails and letters sent to me privately, many of which are nasty and unsigned, as well as others supporting, encouraging, or praising my teaching. There was one telephoned death threat on voice mail that has since been lost, and even though I’ve also lost more than a hundred emails when a hard drive crashed, I still have much more material than I can use.

My goal was to be finishing up the book about now and shopping it around to publishers, but the above-mentioned family responsibilities caused me to adjust my timetable. I don’t regret that, being the proud grandfather of healthy twin grandsons and two beautiful granddaughters with whom I was able to bond for five months. Summer is a busy season for my property-management business around Kezar Lake in Lovell too and that will limit my writing time until it all slows down late in the fall. If all goes right, I should be done with the first draft mid-winter sometime.

It’s been difficult cranking out a column every week while working on the book as well so I’ve begun merging the two here and there. Last week’s column, which I called “Thought Patterns,” was my first effort. It’s what I was working on I left off last January - laying out broad themes into which many lessons in my twentieth-century history curriculum fit. They could be termed “classically liberal” themes, rather than “liberal” in the sense of those whose adherents lately have been calling themselves “Progressives.” Columns like “Thought Patterns” won’t appear in the book verbatim, but some of its paragraphs will.

Had I been finished and shopping the book to publishers now, the timing would have been favorable given recent revelations about IRS harassment of conservatives. It seems that story has legs, however, and it’s likely that it will still be in the news next winter when I’m actually done. I can only hope.