Squander of Conservative

I was born in 1973.  I vaguely remember something about fuel prices and a hostage crisis, but more notably how jellybeans could help stop cigarette smoking.  My brain didn’t really begin to formulate a sense of politics until 1979 as my parents talked about Reagan and Carter.  My political coming of age was during what my father, a lifelong Republican, despairingly called Reaganomics.  I grew to dislike Reagan, not because I was paying attention to who he was or what he was doing, but because he was the only thing I ever heard about.  Reagan poisoned my potatoes. I felt my dad progressively become more and more politically disempowered and disoriented.  My father was a life-long union member weathering though its upper administration corruption.  He was a dogmatic ‘buy-American’ consumer despite the better gas-mileage of Japanese cars and lemon status of his patriotically purchased Dodge Aries K-car that added to his big-business-bailout/corruption name-calling, like Lee-I-A-Coconut.  And more personally, he was my Turn-Off-The-Damn-Light-When-You-Are-Finished-Using-It mentor.

I grew up in rural NH – the Live Free or Die State.  1400 people in my hometown.  Probably more cows than people and certainly less people than may live in one NYC block – my current home.  I drank warm, unpasteurized, and unhomogenized milk from a classmates family farm.  We would fill up those glass bottles at a big stainless tank and close them with the paper stoppers while the cows named Daisy and Moe moo’d contently.   I grew up with homemade bread and cookies my mother baked and a wood stove that burned 7 cords of wood my brothers and father chopped to keep us warm.  In high school, I was very aware that it made my clothes smell of smoke, always.  My parents did all kinds of things that I didn’t really understand until much later.  In 1976, they helped convert an open dump into NH’s first volunteer Recycling Center.  The wood of the new building was treated with waste car oil and still gathers the towns newspapers and continues to host the industry of paper hornets.  That is when I began to learn the curious differences between materials — how to separate tin from aluminum because the tin recycling bin had a magnet hanging over it.  That is also when I began to enjoy the great pleasure of throwing glass bottles (to compact the glass volume in a 50-gallon drum of course, not just to vent my frustrations of adolescence) on the Saturday’s our family was responsible for stewarding the community recycling agenda.  The recycling committee that met on the second Tuesday of the month (that took precedent over my not-sweet-16 birthday) coined or capitalized on the jingoistic phrase:  “Recycling makes cent$”.

My point is, it wasn’t until my early 20′s when I was a budding environmentalist that I realized that my parents weren’t ‘environmentalists’ per se.  My parents were conservatives — old school conservatives, people whose value system was to conserve resources so as to conserve money.  Perhaps another tautology, but to me I had become an environmentalist:  one that conserved resources for environmental reasons.  Regardless of our personal rationales for conserving, when we conserve individually we also conserve our shared natural resources.  Conserving one’s usage is intrinsically civic; one leaves resources for another to access.  There is no tragedy in the commons.  So while I saw images of Sally Struthers holding emaciated children from Ethiopia, the U.S. deficit exponentially grew and grew during Reagan’s time.  Reaganomics was so contentious in my family because it was when resource conservation flew out the window.  Today, to my mind, all the right-wing “Conservatives” have any more is some kind of wacked-out moral conservatism that has morphed into the extreme of the Tea Partiers and the Religious Right and both are seemingly oblivious to growing strength of the Corporatocracy.  The political party identified as “Conservative” today, doesn’t resemble the definition of conservative as I learned it from my family. I’m going to conclude this post with the etymology and definitions of the words — conserve, conservative, and conservation — so that perhaps those that wish, can begin to take back the word. In the meantime, a quiet nod to all those old-school conservatives that hold my heart steady.  Politics feel far from leadership these days.  May the root of the word, conserve, bring Democrats and Republicans back to center of our material world.  The Laws of Thermodynamics don’t have a political agenda and entropy doesn’t care whose side you are on.

Etymology of Conserve:

late 14c., from O.Fr. conserver (9c.), from L. conservare “to keep, preserve, keep intact, guard,” from com-, intensive prefix , + servare “keep watch, maintain”. Related: Conserved; conserving. As a noun (often conserves) from late 14c.

Conserve:

Conservative:

Hello world!

Word press has this little application that takes words from Louis Armstrong’s “Hello Dolly” and intermittently posts fragment of the song in a header as I work back here in administration.  I love Louis!  and post below, the lyrics from my favorite song of his, to set the tone of this blog:  What a wonderful world.

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

The colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shakin’ hands, sayin’ “How do you do?”
They’re really saying “I love you”

I hear babies cryin’, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world

Oh yeah!