In those days, I favored the court's decision prohibiting prayer in the schools and other such intrusions by the left into our societal mores and traditions under the guise of human rights. In the course of a half a century I have completely reversed my opinion on these issues. In those days my idealism led me to join the ACLU because I believed that that the ACLU was an institution which really supported the Constitution as it was written. I did not investigate the history of the ACLU nor of its founder and I was ignorant of its Communist associations. I was motivated by their position on issues, not the least of which in those days was sexual freedom, which came along at an age in which they were guaranteed to find a receptive audience in a young male of that age. The point is that I did not investigate because I was not skeptical. I simply took the ACLU at face value and counted them as an ally in causes which moved me at that age.
Please keep in mind that I was no puppet of the left who had been mesmerized by his professors. In 1964 I worked for Goldwater.
About two decades later, I moved to a new state and went to a Sierra Club meeting as much to meet people someplace other than in a bar. As I sat in the meeting, my first exposure to the Sierra Club, I was treated to a discourse by some leader of the local coven to the effect that we must move heaven and earth to prevent Ronald Reagan from placing defensive missiles in Europe.
By this time I had matured substantially in my conservatism and reacted immediately like a scolded cat. I was able now to recognize that the agenda of the Sierra Club was something other than cleaning up the environment. It was immediately obvious to me that the talk of the environment was a flimflam, a sucker's bet for the unsophisticated but well meaning citizen.
By the 1980s I was able easily to distinguish the façade from the reality of these left wing sham groups. I also had become acutely concerned about how these groups work together to achieve that end which is hostile to my beliefs and welfare. I recite this personal odyssey to confirm the truth of the author's point: "[the lefts]... only true interest is in controlling the United States and all of its citizens."
Today I am proud to say that I am a foaming at the mouth, flopping on the floor conservative. A half a century later, I like to think I'm an older and wiser conservative.
