Reply #10: Liberal is a beautiful, bountiful word. [View All]

[EST]

Progressive is more business-like, a little more straight jacketed.

Republiclowns and self-styled conservatives, who are less conservative than any liberal or progressive, have done their damnedest to make the term "liberal" a pejorative, a pornographic word. They want it to sound ugly.

Between the tight-fisted, Ebeneezer Scrooge type character, without enough soul or "liberalness" to appreciate and empathize with a crippled kid who isn't likely to survive the winter, and the big, open armed man, full of gusto, willing to share his last dollar or his last dram, with the guiding principle of people mean more than things, I know durn well who I wanna be like when I grow up!

Ever notice that all the old cautionary tales that were meant to teach us how to be authentic and how to pattern our lives to gain happiness and satisfaction in place of meanness, smallness and desperation have the crook in the perfect image of a republiclown or a "conservative?"

The villain or crook is NEVER a liberal. Why?
Because liberals aren't like that.

Liberals, for the most part, don't lie. We don't rape, murder, rob, steal or take unfair, criminal advantage of little kids--or the intellectually challenged.

We feel pain when someone else does, cry when they cry and are consumed with joy at someone else's good fortune.

I think we should reclaim the word-take it back and wear it proudly. Not to abandon the "progressives" because embracing the future and pressing for change to accommodate that future are not bad things, either.
I hope this helps, as a definition of progressive and liberal in relationship to the bastardized form of 'conservative.'

Incidentally, liberal and conservative are not opposites. I am a liberal who is quite conservative. Although I may drive older cars and am sometimes generous to a fault, my house and twenty acres are paid off, free and clear, and I owe no one anything.

I am very married, don't slip slide around and tell the truth, sometimes to an embarrassing degree.
So I'm a progressive, conservative liberal. Wanna join the club?