Frankendesign

What are conservatives conserving?
It's hard to know what came first, the chicken or the egg, taxes or tax relief. A key foundation of this country, no taxation without representation, is indirectly an admission that everyone understood the necessity of taxes; of sharing; of the responsibility of a people to a government, a government to its people, and the people to each other. And to be a conservative, as I've come to understand it, means to uphold the ideal that a small government with few taxes, rules, restrictions, and fundamental adherence to the constitution is the better means to our end.

When I think of conservative, I think of my parents, who live the American dream. My father's family worked the land, land that they did not own. My father left home and taught himself to be self sufficient with the lessons of his labored youth. He put himself through school, attained employment, and now owns his own business. My mother's family came from Germany after WWII, and the entire family worked to support each other in a new life much more prosperous than that of the devastated post-Nazi German social and economic structure. I grew up in the house that my father and mother built, on the land they owned, and with the money they earned. They supported me through college, helped my brother buy a house, all while making $35,000 during their best year. Our house never grew larger than the supplies we needed, and the business never grew more than the income needed to support us. We were all comfortably conservative.

But today in America, conservative means earning $1,000,000 in your first quarter. It means consolidating and controlling as many resources as possible. It's about spreading your message so that everyone in the world understands that your ideals are of the highest value and most appropriate for all peoples of the world. It's about keeping the government's nose out of free markets so that competitors are free to put on the gloves, arm the tanks, fill up the vaults, and obliterate everything in their path on the road to market domination, or perhaps I mean prosperity, loosely translated as the pursuit of happiness. It's about using whatever resource you can get your hands on to make your ends meet. How did conservative become contrary to conservation? And preservation? Preservation of the self, sure. Preservation of the community, of a people; preservation of responsibility to the people as a whole? That responsibility is a resource that has been stripped bare and laid waste by the conservative ideal.

I've read the arguments of conservatives who give themselves the moral leg by saying they are upholding the very principles of what our forefathers wrote into the constitution by asserting less government, assuring more government by the people, less of the people. So what happens when the very success of that idea breaks down all levels of equality and justice also guaranteed by the constitution, and does so at the risk of the annihilation of natural resource that enabled us to pursue those guarantees: the people and the land. The liberals, the left, those linked to socialist ideologies, are labeled as anti-America, anti-constitution, breaking down everything our forefathers wanted us to achieve. Whatever happened to "…crown(ing) thy good with brotherhood?" Are not our ideas of government of and for the people every bit as valid as government by the people? We should look at the constitution as a document in a tug-of-war with itself. If you want to take its ideas as literally as they are written, then you should also seek to restore this nation to the original state of context from which the constitution was born: a population of 3,900,000 (as opposed to 270,000,000 today), thirteen colonies, 15,000 buffalo herds; no supermarket supercenters, no petroleum fueled automobiles, no AOL/Time Warner, no clear-cut forests, no arsenic in our drinking water, no hole in the ozone; no run amuck 'success' of capitalism.

So does thinking conservatively not include conservation? By attempting to stay true to the constitution, there is nothing anti-American about the liberal left, nothing any more anti-American than the conservative right. But then I’m not really sure I know what it is they're conserving?