Ever since my fast forwarded, semi-retirement began in 2008, I have found a good deal of pleasure in planting and maintaining the landscaping around the house which we own, but still pay the local government a huge amount for the privilege of living in. And even though planting low maintenance flora is my goal, even that standard requires quite a bit of moisture if you want it to thrive.
And so it is with the propagation and nurture of concepts and ideas as well. To that end, I constantly comb the internet for interesting information, ideas and people about which to write. Recently in an article written for this page, I referenced an interesting person and his blog. His name is Wesley Messamore and his blog-site is called The Humble libertarian. I recently included a link to it among the others I recommend in the right hand column of this page.
My idea of a good blog-site is one where you can learn something you didn't know before and where there is some original, quality content to agree or disagree with. It's what I try to deliver here, and what Wes & Co. succeed in doing over at The Humble libertarian.
Without really knowing much about Wes, I was intrigued by the grasp he seems to have on issues concerning liberty and the talented writing he and his contributing editors publish on the site. The reason for my intrigue was his apparent age. Even with only a good ball park estimate of his age (he has since informed me of his two decade plus presence among us) I had concluded that I have been bloviating about freedom issues for longer than he has graced this earth. In fact, as my old Berghoff lunch-mate “JO” used to say after encountering a whiz-kid trader on the floor, "Hey, I have kids older than him, Hell, I may even have tennis shoes older than him!"
I'm not sure of the path this young man took to his arrive at his beliefs, or how he got there with such eloquence so quickly, but as the saying goes, the fruit always falls close to the tree, so I would guess it has some connection to his parents or family in general.
As I remarked to Wes in an email, "While most people your age have Levis, you seem to be wearing freedom genes".
On a personal level, our own offspring have a fondness for liberty that can probably be traced back to the long love affair my wife and I have had with freedom, (one second only to the one with each other) so the concept of passing your beliefs along to your children isn't peculiar only to Chicago Democrats or others beholden to the machine for their daily bread. (Even Republicans are Democrats in Chicago if they want to eat.)
The left long ago recognized the obvious; that the young people are the ones who matter when planning for the future. So they seeded many of the government schools and universities while the frog was cooking and today we are seeing the fruits of that farming. From my perspective, the fruit is bitter, millions upon millions of “twenty somethings” embracing the politics of personality and swooning at the prospect of big government “solutions” to societal problems. Short on analysis but long on adoration of the anointed, they are at least partially responsible for the latest crop failure of American governance.
But there are always some weeds in the lawn, and the emergence of a growing number of freedom minded folks of that same age demographic gives me some un-Obamesque hope for actual climate change, of the political variety. And if it can change at anything like the rate the dandelions multiply in my lawn, my children and grandchildren still have an outside chance.
Tonight, Wed. Dec. 2, Wesley will be interviewing the former Governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson on his web-blog radio program. By the time this is posted, it will be concluded but you can replay it anytime afterward from a link at his site. I snitched a few U-Tube clips from his blog and have added them below so you can see what this former Governor accomplished in his eight years using small government principles in the real world instead of merely making speeches and organizing communities to demand more government programs. Maybe we can all learn something about a guy few of us have ever heard of before.
Although probably not delighted to be described as weeds, young freedom spokesmen need to be "watered" to grow, so even though I think Wesley has already been baptized in a much more important ceremony, I'm going to pour some cyber water on his cyber head right here in an effort to irrigate the tree of liberty with something other than the blood of patriots.
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