Troll
Posted on 08/29/2003 6:44:18 PM PDT by Recourse
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/136294_firstperson25.html
First Person: Looking for liberals? Follow brains
Monday, August 25, 2003
By GREG JAMES
GUEST COLUMNIST
For several years I've been listening to folks of the conservative persuasion going on about the liberal bias in the media, in Hollywood and among elites on the West and East coasts. There's no denying that liberals outnumber conservatives on the two coasts. It is also apparent if you work in certain fields like education, the arts, or high tech that liberals also greatly outnumber conservatives there, too.
Is this some kind of conspiracy or is it just a fact that you get many more liberals where the education levels are the highest and where the concentrations of the brains are? Is it a coincidence that most of America's big liberal cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Boston are also the centers of high tech and the nation's best universities? Even in a conservative state such as Texas, the fastest growing big PC company in the world -- Dell -- is located in Austin, the most liberal, and educated, city in the state. I'm all for open and free discussions on the subject, but from all the anecdotal evidence around, one thing seems to be obvious: Liberals are where the brains are, and the brains are where liberals are.
This got me thinking. The definition of conservative in the dictionary is "one who is resistant to change, or disposed to preserve existing conditions." From a historical perspective, conservatives were the folks who clung to the idea that the Earth was flat. They opposed the end of slavery. They thought it was a bad idea that women be allowed to vote, and more recently, they opposed the end of segregation and the civil rights movement.
Our current president and his followers all seem to be singing the praises of a return to conservative values, and the recent election wins by the right wing seem to support that view. I'm worried. In a world that is dynamic and rapidly changing, are we well served by folks who have the basic belief that the good old days can be maintained? Wouldn't good conservatives be the equivalent of business folks clinging to the notion that we should all still be using the "trusty old typewriter"?
Conservatives generally oppose family planning and are in favor of tightening our borders but have no real answer to a world population that increases by 100 million people per year and who will naturally end up looking for new places to settle. Conservatives are in favor of a smaller federal government but have recently been calling for that same government to increase spending on defense and homeland security. Conservatives consistently want the government to endorse the Christian faith but at the same time find governments around the world run by conservative religious leaders to be the biggest threats to our national security.
The point isn't specific issues. The point is that old-style thinking in a dynamic, growing world with dynamic and growing problems is precisely the wrong way to react. As ironic as it may sound, the response this country had to 9/11 and the follow-up invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq may be just what the conservatives in those countries were hoping for to further their own "eye for an eye" archaic way of thinking. It may well end up pouring fuel on the proverbial fire and give them more excuses to hate what they perceive to be the domineering attitude of the west.
America sometimes seems to be a paradox: We're a country founded by amazingly smart people who saw the dangers of state-endorsed religion yet we have to devote much energy and time to fending off people who want to infuse our government with that same religion. We're a country that leads the world in high tech yet we have a large segment of the population that doesn't realize that high tech, universities, brilliant minds and liberal thinking all often go and in hand. We pride ourselves on our freedoms but then have to deal with folks who can't comprehend that freedom also extends to alternative lifestyles. I wonder how many people have really given thought to the fact that we're a much more liberal society today than we were 100 years ago and that it has been liberal creative thinking from day one that has put America ahead of most of the rest of the world.
It has become almost vogue to bash liberal thinking. You hear it on the radio and you are reminded of it on the television. However, if it's liberal thinkers that got us used to the notion that the world is not flat, that led slaves to their freedom and that fought for the right of women to vote, then I'm ultimately going to put my money on liberal thinking to come up with ways to solve today's national and global problems.
Greg James is president of Topics Entertainment of Seattle.
© 1998-2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Don't believe me? Just ask them.
No news here, they've been telling us how smart they are for decades.
There's no conspiracy, just that they have the same mindset. People who work in moral-liberal industries are expected to adhere to moral-liberal thinking. Actors who speak out against abortion as a rule do not get acting roles, just as artists who speak out against the form of murder called sodomy do not get nice write-ups in the Chronicle. Out of cowardly fear of losing employment in their moral-liberal industries do they go along with the proselytizing of moral-liberalism.
Troll
Sense of humor has nothing to do with it -- this JimRob's bandwidth....
ZOT alert....incoming...!!!!!
TC
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