Thursday, February 09, 2012

Why Am I a Conservative?


Why Am I a Conservative? is a 1-minute contest
set up by and for CPAC to explain (as the title
suggests) in less than 60 seconds, why
a person is a conservative…
The original text (some of which I cut because
of the time limits) for my entry (which was not
among the three top winners) follows:

Why I am a conservative?

I am a conservative because of telephones.
Until the 1970s, there was no innovation,
hadn't been any, hardly, for decades
everybody had the same yucky-colored telephone,
khaki, black, cream — with a rotary dial —
brought to your home by a government employee…

But hey! Look at the good side: everybody was equal!
All of us, throughout the nation, throughout the world,
we were all equal! we all had the same basic telephone!

Then, at the time that Ronald Reagan became president, AT&T was broken up.
State monopoly vanished, private companies emerged.
All of a sudden, we got innovation, we got new technology
from push phones to wireless sets to cel phones to smartphones
Stores sprang up all over America, all over the world,
jobs were created, in an area that was not even thought of
as an industry previously!

And guess what — it's totally disorderly, it's chaotic,
there is no overview and — What is "worse", quote unquote:
Nobody is equal!
The "gap" between the basic phones
and the smart phones keeps growing!
And yet!
The poor person with the most basic phone built
over the past decades, in any part of the world,
has better equipment — he is richer, phone-wise —
than the wealthiest American multi-billionaire of three decades ago

I am a conservative because of telephones.

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