Indoctrination, Interrupted

Dennis Prager says that it is possible that a person could go their entire life without being exposed to a single conservative idea or principle. School-children are indoctrinated rather than educated. They are taught to feel compassion for animals and the environment, but not personal responsibility. Then they attend liberal institutions of higher education, to earn their B.A.'s, M.A.'s, and PhD's. The rest of their lives are filled with exposure to liberal friends, culture, and media.

I was on track to become one of these people. As a child, I was riding in my father's car, and we passed a police station. A black man was being taken out of a patrol car by an officer. Since I was taught very early on by my liberal mother that black people were victims of society and poverty, I offered to my father, "He probably just stole a loaf of bread." He was incensed, and let me know, gently, that there was no way I should assume that.

Too bad for me that I didn't have a father in the home until I was already in high school. When I was in college, Ronald Reagan was elected. The left constantly portrayed him as a trigger-happy moron, so I voted for the other guy. About a year or two into Reagan's first term, my father took us on a ski trip to Mammoth. I liked to go off on my own, pressing my skill on the black diamond runs.

On one lift, I rode with a gentleman who brought the conversation around to politics. He said he was glad that Reagan was President, because we shouldn't be giving welfare to able-bodied people. "They should be working like the rest of us, if they can." I agreed with that, inside of my heart of hearts.

It wasn't until my final Economics class in senior year that I was exposed to a conservative point of view by a professor. I went to U.C. San Diego, which is to the right of Berkeley and Columbia, but left of just about everyone else. My professor was this thin, bald guy in his forties. He liked to put three or four packets of sugar in his styrofoam cup of coffee before class. The subject of executive compensation came up. Somewhere in my heart, I believed that to grub for money was kind of dirty. I knew that I was preparing myself for a career of some sort, but I still had no idea what kind of work I wanted to do. Maybe a management position, if not graduate school.

The idea that C.E.O.'s were all grossly overpaid had been drummed into all of our heads. My professor mentioned one executive who made $300,000 per year, and the classroom let out a collective 'tsk-tsk.' These individuals were responsible for earning a return of investment on the resources placed in their trust, he pointed out. That amount is commensurate with the value of those resources. This was a radical idea to the classroom, one that had never been considered. And these were all Economics majors. Had it not been for that one professor, one never knows what kind of political ideology I would gravitate toward. I like to identify with my father, so I like to think my drift toward libertarian/conservative would have been inevitable, but you never know...