I Have A Blindspot For Ugly

Not surprisingly, there were many mentions of Obama and the incoming administration and the historic inauguration yesterday on all of the social networks. What I found interesting was the willingness of the young voters to actually engage in a political discussion. As a young voter myself, I was pleasantly surprised to see so many in my generation taking an interest in politics.

That is until I read what many of them were saying.

I cannot begin to describe the blatant hatred and disrespect for the outgoing President Bush. Setting aside the fact that those at the actual inauguration both booed and mocked President Bush, the vitriol spewed by some of those online was appalling. I’m not going to go into specifics here, but it was nasty.

Instead, I’m going to focus on the positives I took out of the day. I was proud to see a surprisingly large number of young conservatives defending their viewpoints! Here were the people that the party should have reached out to (that post is upcoming,) openly expressing their issues both with the incoming and outgoing administration.

What’s even better, they were civil.

My peers and I in the conservative youth have been blasted with attempts to sway our opinions to the left by teachers and administrations at our respective universities, the mainstream media, and have also been bombarded with pro-Obama and liberal democrat ads on many of the social networks we frequent. We’re often approached with the question: How can you be conservative at your age?

Here’s how:
• We’re concerned about the safety of America.
This is a big, BIG, issue among the youth. The war in Iraq was a central issue for most of the campaign season. It affects our generation greatly, as we see our friends deployed to fight terrorism abroad. We worry that the Obama administration is going to be soft on defense and endanger the safety of both the average American citizen here at home, and the brave men and women fighting for our freedom overseas. While our professors and the MSM play the blame Bush card at every opportunity, those of us in the conservative youth know that he didn’t start this.
• We don’t want to lose our personal liberties.
The largest issue here seems to be the right to own firearms. We want to be able to own guns responsibly and legally. We definitely advocate taking gun safety classes and practicing caution when keeping them in homes, but we fully believe in the right to own them.
• We don’t want socialized healthcare.
We don’t want the government interfering in our lives any more than it already is. Actually, we’d like it to back off. A lot. The progressive agenda being pushed by liberals (and supported by some RINOs) includes socialized healthcare, and we don’t want any part of it. Once the government gets its hands on healthcare, it will inevitably screw it up. Yes, it sounds nice to be able to say “we have free healthcare for everyone!” But the reality is, it’s not free. The government would foot the bill. And that means we foot the bill. Which brings me to the biggest issue of all:
• We want to keep our money.
We want the government to be fiscally responsible. We’ve seen a HUGE increase in spending and proposed spending in the last year alone. Where’s that money coming from? Our pockets. We don’t want to see our government taxing us only to turn around and give that money away to those who either don’t work for it, or have made such poor business decisions that they can’t make it themselves.

I grew up with the belief that I could be whatever I wanted to be, achieve whatever I set my mind to, live the American dream. What happened to desire to be self-reliant? Why are people so willing to line up for a government handout? At what point did we stop saying “I can do it” and start asking for money for nothing?

I think it started when we stopped keeping score in little league. Laugh at that if you will, but kids stopped learning that hard work leads to results and that success feels good.