I used to be a real liberal. Not Che Gueverra liberal, or Timothy Leary liberal, but maybe Jimmy Carter liberal. Anyway, liberal enough to watch a movie like "Billy Jack" and think "Hey, he's got some pretty good political points" rather than just thinking "Hey, he can kick some serious butt."

I used to believe that if everyone just put down their guns and planted a tree and held hands and sang "Kumbaya", then we could all have peace on Earth. Technically, I reckon I still do believe this, it's just that as I've grown older I've come to realize how unlikely this is to happen. I think that even most liberals these days would admit this.

Lots of young folks are liberal. I don't know why this is. They all believe in socialized medicine and welfare programs and gun control. I think that as people get older they start to realize that they're the ones having to pay for all the social programs and maybe get a little pissed off that someone else is living on their dime.

Either that, or it's a physical thing. I mean, you know how someone has a stroke sometimes and it paralyzes half their body? Well, maybe when people get older the left side of their brain starts to atrophy and they stop being idealistic, creative, and romantic, and they just become pragmatic and logical.

I'm not saying that conservatives are bitter, mean, and misanthropic. Some are. But there are plenty of liberals out there protesting Big Tobacco and spiking old-growth forests, too.

I think that most of the public is a lot more conservative than the liberals would have us believe. But by the same token, I think the general public is also a great deal more liberal than the conservatives would like us to think. This is why everyone claims the middle. Because each side knows they're not going to convert the other, and the only way they're going to win any elections is by winning the center.

The older you get, the more conservative you get. It's a biological fact. You can observe monkeys in the wild and the young ones are always staging sit-ins and protesting, and the older ones are all sitting around thinking about how much the jungle has changed since they were kids.

Another funny thing about being young is that you have all these great ideas and think that you're the first one to have them. Or you come up with a solution so simple that you can't believe that no one's ever tried it before and what idiots the older folks are for not trying it that way. It never occurs to a young person that someone did try it that way 20 years ago and it didn't work then, either.

I imagine some old-timey dinosaur saying to the neighborhood kids "Don't go swimming in those tar pits!" and the young whipper-snapper dinosaur saying "We want to be who we are and not live by your stodgy old rules!" And the result of it is fossil fuel.

It's kind of ironic that the young folks who think they know everything are so willing to try new and different things. Because if they did know everything they would know that sometimes the established way of doing things is the best way, and that's how it came to be "established". Because the oher ways caused things to blow up. Not that I'm against new and different things: Just that sometimes I think it's best to dip your toes in the water before you dive in. Just ask that Joni woman who paints watercolors holding the paintbrush in her mouth.

But if young folks are hell-bent on change at any cost, just for the sake of change, the vast majority of older folks are dead-set against change of any kind for any reason. This might also be why they drive so slow; not so much because they don't want to get where they're going, but because they're still thinking how great it was where they just were.