Why do I think differently than many of my peers?

 A friend asked me why I was so opposed to socialism and still supported free enterprise and self-reliance.  There are a multitude of reasons, but they come down to which system better protects individual freedom.  There is, of course, a price that the individual pays for that freedom and a lot of people are obviously unwilling to accept the responsibility associated with it.  I ask myself why I think the way that I do and others think differently and conclude that it all starts with family and is refined and reinforced by life experience.  My fellow citizen in today's America has had a much different life experience and I suggest that accounts for my being out of step with my society.  Given the way in which people are being conditioned today, I see little chance that my way of looking at life's challenges will prevail.

I was fortunate to have been born into a strong family, but I was not a good student in either grammar or high school, and I did poorly in my first two years in college.  My Navy veteran father and John Wayne's movies obviously influenced me and I voluntarily gave up a college exemption from the draft and enlisted in the army during the height of the Korean War, because I saw it as my duty to country.  Korea was a seminal moment in my life and, ironically, my two mediocre years of college almost certainly saved my life.  The army mistakenly thought that I might be intelligent and refused to let me join the paratroops insisting instead that I learn how to speak Chinese.  Had I been deployed to Korea at the time, the odds were high that I would not have lived through the experience and my assignment to military intelligence added a certain cachet to my developing resume.  While in Korea, I woke up to the horror of war, turned down a commission in the army, and naively decided to devote myself to making peace in the world.  I set out to become a diplomat, because soldiers fight wars and diplomats make peace.  (My disillusion with that oversimplification came much later in life.)

For thirty years of my life I learned about, thought about, and tried to influence foreign populations in a wide variety of different stages of social and economic development.  I learned how to speak varying degrees of several foreign languages, lived in underdeveloped countries, developed friendships with people who were very different than myself and dealt with varying types of conflict from village level combat in Viet Nam, through subversive activity at village level in Thailand, to the potentially nuclear struggle with the Soviet Union.  Along the way, I played a small part in negotiating the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese control.  I directed our counter-insurgency effort at village level, managed the lives of thousands of people living in refugee centers at home and abroad and, in all of it, I had an opportunity to see American and foreign leaders at all levels from village headmen to foreign monarchs and American presidents.  I met dictators and democratically elected presidents.  I do not claim intelligence, but I do claim experience, and I conclude that today's America is on the wrong domestic and international track.  Very unfortunately, I also conclude that I can not do anything about it.  My fellow citizens, conservative and liberal alike, know more about all of it than do I and they conclude that I "live in Lala Land."  They are hell bent on destroying us and I can not find a way to wake them up.

I see a fundamental need for more self-reliance, individual responsibility, and realism on the part of all Americans from national leaders down to individual citizens.  That view informs my political stance on the issues that are before us and accounts for the difference between my own and my fellow Americans' political views.  I just plain do not have that much confidence in "government,"particularly one elected, and staffed, by people who have not been outside of their own backyard, intellectually and physically, and do not think things through.