You can’t name a person more liberal than me…and I’m proud of it. However, having said that, my suspicion is that I need to be more liberal and speak out about other needs within the society. However, before I move more to the left, I need to get more people to move away the right.

Name a social issue in your lifetime or mine…let’s start with the Civil War…in case either of us is older than we wish to admit. Here is a list of a dozen major issues and dates that I feel that are critically important to the health and happiness of America:

Now, which of these movements wasn’t started, funded, fought for, and dealt with and/or still dealing with now that wasn’t a liberal cause. After many of these causes became fashionable after years of battling, moderates have on occasions gravitated to some of the issues. Nevertheless, the conservatives started none of these movements. However, while slavery/segregation, prohibition, creationism, Joe McCarthy and the communist witch-hunt, polluting the earth, the birthers, and sexism are too slowly fading from the minds of too many Americans.

What rattles my mind is just how learning-disabled we are as Americans. We say that we are the most progressive and freedom-loving people when in reality we generally are Johnny-come-lately when it comes to most social reform movements.

Let’s look at some of the movements and how we faired with the rest of the Western World. For example, slavery was outlawed by an act of the British Parliament on August 29, 1833. We fought the Civil War from April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865 with a loss of around 700,000 deaths. That was over thirty years after the British passed a law that didn’t result in the deaths of nearly three quarters of a million lives. Eventually, the North won the war but lost the peace. The US abolished slavery, but, in the South and parts of the North, segregation replaced slavery. It took another century finally to win the Civil War…against segregation.

However, we still have the birthers who think that President Obama was really born in Kenya and not Hawaii. What percentage of birthers that are that mentally challenged to believe that nonsense? On the issues of slavery/segregation, we are indeed Johnny-come-lately.

We are self-righteously proud of our rights to vote and hold them closely to our chest…if you are a male. Women in the US got suffrage in 1920. However, New Zealand gave the right to vote to women in 1893, Australia in 1902, Finland in 1906, Denmark/Iceland 1915, Canada in 1917, Russia in 1917, Azerbaijan in 1918, Estonia in 1918, Germany in 1918, Republic of Georgia in 1918, Hungary in 1918, Latvia in 1918, Poland 1918, Great Britain in 1918, Lithuania in 1919, Luxembourg in 1919, Belarus in 1919, Netherlands in 1919, and Sweden in 1919. Finally, in 1920, the women in Albania and America got the right to vote. Nevertheless, we weren’t the last to wake-up. Women in the Vatican and Saudi Arabia still can’t vote....

What about our record of accomplishment regarding a governmental social security plan for workers? Here again, we are proud of our Social Security program in the States. However, America adopted our Social Security system nearly a half-century after Germany, which got one in 1889. Again, we were not only behind the times but also behind loads of other nations. Here is a partial list and dates: Belgium in 1900, France 1905 voluntary and mandatory in 1928, Australia in 1908, Great Britain in 1911, Luxembourg in 1911/1931, USSR in 1922, Serbia in 1922, and Chile 1924. Other countries got onboard and finally the Congress passed the Society Security Act, and it was signed by FDR on August 14, 1935.

I would like to illustrate one more liberal caused that America adopted extremely late in the game in comparison to the rest of the world. We just passed a national healthcare reform program. Look at the countries and the dates of their universal healthcare programs. It should be noted that we got to healthcare reform, but we are not into universal healthcare. We still won’t be covering about 10 million Americans with healthcare insurance.

http://truecostblog.com/2009/08/09/countries-with-universal-healthcare-by-date/

There are many things that America needs to do to get up to where the rest of the Western world. Nevertheless, much of the developing-world has also outpaced us already. Here are things that it is imperative that we address:

1. Give up on the notion that we are on the cutting-edge of social movements in comparison to the rest of the world. We aren’t. There is no historical proof to that claim. When it came to abolishing slavery, we were decades behind the British who we fought with to gain our independence less than a century before. We were nearly a half century behind the leader, Germany, in addressing the social security issue. We were also nearly a century behind the world leader, Norway, on universal healthcare…and we still don’t have a universal healthcare program.
2. We need to get educated. This isn’t just in school but everywhere. We need to read, watch news, and educational TV programming. Additionally, we need to get our brains connected to the Internet. We need not start by getting outside the box educationally. Thinking inside the box is both necessary and essential. The rest of the world spends more time in schools than we do and their populace is generally better educated. I’ve studied in grad school overseas and travelled all over the world in the past 40-years. Trust me; the world is better informed than we are.
3. Just say no to the just say no group. Palin was a 2½-year year governor of Alaska and a mayor of Wasilla, a town of 10,000. Methinks that she and her follower, the birthers, and the Tea Party need to hear us say, Get educated.
4. This issue of getting more liberal isn’t just a personal quest. If we don’t, we won’t make it as a nation. Other countries, who think, will surpass us in the near future. They will go beyond us unless we get educated and change our modes operandi on nearly everything.

I know that attempting to make all my readers as liberal as me will take some time. Nevertheless, many of my readers need to move away from the right, which is a wrong place to be—just look at all human history.

An Old Man and His Grandson

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Obama Signing the Affordable Care Act

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Forrest Gump, "Stupid is as stupid does."

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