Humbling experience?

Someone asked me this morning if losing my campaign for re-election to the School Board last night was a humbling experience. After giving it some thought, I surprised myself by answering "No." You see, I realized something. To say that losing an election is humbling is to say, by extension, that winning is an ego boost. Neither should be the case.

What should be (and for me is, indeed) humbling is the experience of running for office, results not withstanding. To ask people to give me their trust, to know that I am committing myself to years of asking their opinions, their desires, their wants and their needs, that is humbling.

Public service, community service should be just that: service. In its simplest, purest form, it is an oath by the candidates to put their own interests aside in favor of standing for the desires and defending the rights of those whom we hope to represent.

Representation is the most difficult form of service possible because the public's freedoms and demands must come first. They must come before the personal interests of the representative, because he or she is standing in the place of those who are being represented. Agendas must be set aside, considerations from our full time jobs ignored, demands from our political parties relegated to the back burner. When one is acting in an official capacity, one can be nothing but the vessel through which the public speaks and acts.

There are few tasks more difficult to perform honorably and conscientiously than representation of one's community.

Am I humbled by losing? No. Am I humbled by participating? Very much so. Was I humbled by serving for the last three years? More than you can imagine.

Anyone who is not humbled, who finds the exhiliration of exercising power too much to resist, who cannot understand that public officials have many, many employers and every one of them must be respected to the utmost... Well, people like might want to consider another line of work. They're probably not fit for public service.

Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say

In one of the most famous dystopian novels of all time, George Orwell paints a picture of a society completely dominated by the Government. The world of 1984 is one in which even language is controlled by those in power. By creating a new language they call "Newspeak", the rulers of England clamp their iron fists around not only the actions of their subjects, but their thoughts as well.

After all, we use the language we speak when we think. By removing certain concepts, the Government would, in effect, remove the ability of the people to long for certain things. Words like "freedom" and "rebellion" disappear from the language and thus from the collective consciousness of an entire nation.

Another trick used by the creators of "Newspeak" is to change the meaning of a word until it signifies the diametric opposite of what it once did. This is a trick being used to great effect by the Lib-Dem Establishment hell bent on destroying our fundamental freedoms today.

Take the word "Progressive," for instance. On the surface, it would denote someone who is interested in progress, in building on what has come before to leave the next generation with something that is greater and better than that which the previous generation left us. That, however, is not at all the case with those who call themselves "progressives" today.

After the word “liberal” came to be viewed as a pejorative term in the 1980s, liberals sought to find a new term with which to label themselves and settled upon the word “progressive”. In doing so, they hoped to indicate to the world that they represented the path forward where conservatives, in their attempts to preserve age old traditions, values ethics and mores, were holding back society from its natural evolution.

The problem with this idea is that liberals are not, in fact, looking to progress from where we are to where we seek to be. They are seeking to replace today’s state of being with a new set of circumstances. In the process, they would destroy what we have and set something else in place.

This path is inherently destructive. It results in a state of rootlessness, in a erasure of history, in an annihilation of tradition and culture. It is, in essence, circular because the process becomes an unending loop of destruction of the past, replacement with what they want and a repeat of the destruction which led to the new state. It is circular but even more so, it makes destruction the foundation of society. The so-called progress of liberalism is fundamentally so circular and destructive that – in the process – the society it seeks to create becomes, by nature, unstable, thereby facilitating its own destruction to make way for the next “progressive” phase of evolution.

Is this, in fact, progress? Of course not. By destroying before building anew, you never end up with more, you have never in fact moved ahead. You have simply cobbled together something to replace that which was, but – at best – you remain in the same place. At worst, you have a pale imitation of what you had before, something which has never had to stand the rigorous tests of time and history.

True progress (and, by extension, true "progressivism") comes when one examines what is already in place, improves upon it and adds to it. Imagine society being like a building, with each generation having the opportunity to construct one, single story.
One half of the generation decides to get to work right away and begin building, placing brick on top of brick throughout their entire adult lives. They learn from the floors below, trying to avoid the mistakes while learning from the glories of their predecessors' successes.

Now, the other half of the generation is convinced that they have no need to learn from the past, the past has nothing to offer. Instead, they spend half their lives obliterating as many of the floors below as they can in order to clear the lot for their single story. While they have inherited an edifice with so many floors that it would be all but impossible to learn everything there is to learn about it, their children's legacy will be a single floor shack.

Progress? Really? I must be rather nearsighted because I just don't see it.

I, for one, want to leave my children the Library at Alexandria, the Pyramids, the Sphinx, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Roman Aqueducts, the bridges by which we have forded the world's greatest rivers and the skyscrapers which reach out to caress the heavens all rolled into one.

The so-called "Progressives" want to leave their progeny a double-wide.