Conservatism

My Testament (Reflection)

Who cares about politics? 

All the way until about my twenty-sixth year - that is, for me, the divisively volatile 2016 - I was for the most part entirely unpolitical. I had a basic understanding of the governmental structure my own country, Australia, worked by in that we had the primary opposing parties of Labor and Liberal. Confusingly, the Liberals here are not the actual "liberals" in the sense that the term would suggest to Americans. The Australian Liberals are the historically conservative, but nowadays predominantly neo-con party that generally represents the the business class and, as my dad would always say, "rich people". The Australian Labor Party (ALP) was the left-leaning side, though thankfully they are not as inured with far-left policies as the U.S. Democrats now are - not yet, anyway. Back in my days of ignorance, I figured I kind of leant towards the left side of politics simply because my parents openly supported the Labor party. I was made to understand that they had the interest of my family and myself more in mind than John Howard's prime-ministership did. 

If it don't need fixing ... 

However, the conservative streak in me did already exist deep down. I remember the night of the 2001 Federal Election between the incumbent Howard and Labor leader Kim Beazley. I was staying at a friend 's house with a bunch of others. We hired the Arnold Schwarzenegger film, The 6th Day, and something else about an invisible guy that goes into a girl's changing room - we were only ten or eleven. During our own nefarious preoccupations, my friend's parents were following the election, and I remember feeling distinctly relieved when they told us John Howard was re-elected. Even at the age, I had this vague fear about crazed leaders - perhaps I had recently seen something about the Nazis - and my rationale was that if everything seemed more or less fine, then probably we were safer just keeping the leader we had. You never know when some lunatic might get voted in from left field. (As it happened, the next election in 2004 nearly led to this, with the unhinged and now "far right" Mark Latham running for Labor). I was something of a status-quo kid at the time, given my privileged lower-middleclass life in a nice, semi-rural, predominantly white neighbourhood.  Everything seemed fine to me because it was. I was a kid who hadn't yet learned the universal fact that there would always be many people much less fortunate than I was. I didn't want that to change. 

I had no reason to think, at this point, "hey, I must be a conservative". It's just that I felt, as many a conservative would, that something I didn't think needed fixing was best left alone. I cannot remember if I told my parents I was glad Howard won.

But blue lives do matter ... 

Another early experience that signalled to me where my values lay was in 2002 when the same bunch of friends rented The Matrix, which only one or two of us had seen before. For some reason, I was under the impression it was a comedy. I remember one day at school, presiding over one of the benches and enjoying our canteen lunches, I asked a friend what one of the funniest parts were. After thinking for a moment, he said something like: "there's this part where the main characters go into this building with heaps of guns and kill everyone and then walk into the elevator".  

I was somewhat stunned at the idea. Had I missed something?

Being thus informed when we actually watched it a few nights later, I was vaguely prepared for the scene in which the heroes apparently killed a bunch of people. I will admit I actually found myself, despite initial misgivings, enjoying the film. With its pretentious quasi-intellectual Marxist message about rebellion, and its reality-bending physics, most boys would. Hell, most men do.