Sunset, Wednesday, 2 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

I’m sure there are plenty of other bloggers who have to fix a chainsaw in the pouring rain while composing an entry and watching the sunset in order to post a daily painting. We could form a professional association. The name doesn’t really matter, as long as it makes the acronym M E N T A L.

I’ve been catching up with an old friend who was a significant person in my life, and she wrote something I found quite striking. We were both once strict “laissez-faire libertarians,” part of a group that, at the time, would have objected to being labeled ‘conservative’. However, conservative is what we were, when you get down to it; some in our old cohort have even since slithered on over into that grotto called neoconservatism.

In any event, her comment was somehow the most accessible explanation I’ve seen for why a person would mature into a liberal.

I have moved way across the spectrum since the early days of knowing you and today would shamelessly describe myself as a tax-and-spend liberal. One of my biggest frustrations is with the reluctance of the American people to devote themselves and their money to creating a more robust community and to assuring a more satisfying life experience for others sharing the planet at the very same moment in time.

Simple humanity and common sense.