(my) Declaration (of Independence)

(my) Declaration (of independence)

How does a 1960s very liberal left wing college professor in his early 20s- I mean leading marches, crosses burned in lawn, criticized by local paper as "Bobby Kennedy, Eric Sevareid, and some other guy I can't remember, all rolled into one, teaching our kids socialist principles” type - turn into a 2020 Trump supporter in his late 70s? Of course some of this can be attributed to the well-known adage that we grow more conservative as we grow older I mean my father started out as an "IWW" leftie in his 20s and ended up as a Nixon guy in his 60s. only trouble with that is that I really never changed. I'm still a lifetime registered Democrat who considers himself very liberal -please don't use the term progressive around me it's just a sham phrase -who remains antiwar in Afghanistan and Iraq. I mean I haven't changed. you could say I was teaching my kids at a southern university left wing, socialist principles until I retired not long ago, though I tried to remain factual, particularly when discussing historical events, even though I had by then become a Trump advocate. so what happened? could it be that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" and for that matter Republican and Democrat changed their meaning, not me changing my principles? that's exactly what happened. as early as 2016 I was telling my kids -for those of you in Loma Linda that means my students- that those terms didn't matter anymore what we were really dealing with clearly by then and probably long before were politicians who were either part of the Establishment or yearning to be and those who wanted to break that very establishment into pieces and either drastically revise the way our democracy had come to be or perhaps even do away with the existing order and start all over again through a new constitutional convention. I found myself very much with the latter by the mid 2010's and when Trump came down the escalator, completely inexperienced in politics, and soon destroyed the establishment Bush in the primaries he got my attention. was he simply a buffoon or was he basically saying the same things that I was feeling and saying? so I began to examine what he was actually saying rather than his unorthodox in-your-face kind of delivery. domestically he sounded very much like FDR: "let's get America going again stop sending our businesses overseas and bring them back home”. Made in America is a good thing. let's support our workers and tighten up our educational processes; equal opportunity for all in the workplace and in the classroom. let me pause here for a moment Trump probably did more for African Americans in his four years by placing them as a priority in his new American economy than anyone had since LBJ signed all those civil rights acts. I had a very articulate young black man tell me out loud in a classroom toward the end of my teaching career "I don't care about black power white power yellow power what I care about is Green power." Made sense to me. Isn't that what Trump and Ben Carson were saying - I mean I have driven by some of his HUD projects in my primary town of residence and man were they nice, sturdy and affordable; my wife and I could have easily lived in one of those units if we didn't have three dogs. anyway, I digress, now about foreign policy. I loved it. I'm not ashamed to admit it. lets try to diplomatically pursue new avenues of relationships with the bad guys like Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin and Xi Jenping while standing up to each and every one of them when the chips were down. I mean talk about being a hard ass. No wonder the establishment couldn't stand him from the get-go. makes sense- this guy was different could not be bought and was a real danger to their status quo benefits. it didn't matter whether you were a so-called republican like Mitt Romney Liz Cheney and · other rhinos or a Democrat like Schumer and Pelosi they were all sucking off the same teat of big government. why would they want to give that up? Look, they can impeach the guy three or four more

times if they want to it won't change my opinion; he was a breath of fresh air and when you think about it really a traditional FDR type of Democrat. you know he spent most of his life as a Democrat giving big bucks to democratic candidates including, note this carefully, bill and Hillary Clinton, who he dined with more than once. no I don't think I changed. And I really don't think Donald Trump was all that conservative in the traditional sense of that term. I think the politicians substituted the outlandish 1930s workers' rights term "progressive" in order to keep their places in the established government hierarchy - they are no different than Soros Bezos Gates you name them they all will do anything to hold on to their benefits. Wouldn't you? So there you have it, my coming-out party, no two ways about it. I am still me and it's the politicians who have changed the meaning of the terms.

Donald Trump you're alright by me.