Today’s youth should open minds to ideas
by Chris Taylor, editor-in-chief

    The other day I happened to be reading an advice column in the paper when I saw something that horrified me.

    The first line said, “I am 15 years old and a lifelong conservative.”

    What?

    How can you be 15 and a lifelong anything other than tax deduction or general pain in the rear? For that matter, who in their right mind would ever admit such a ridiculous statement?

    Conservative means that you are averse to change and that you are not open to new thoughts or ideas. This is terrible, period, and even more so if you are only 15.

    It’s sad that a 15 year old has already closed her mind to new ideas and decided she already knows everything.

    When I was growing up and teenagers thought they knew everything, it was called obnoxious. Now it’s conservative.

    Those two words probably carry the same meaning now.

    That would be the problem with being a conservative. You basically don’t believe in change or new ideas.

    As a teenager one should be open to new ideas and experiences; instead, now a teenager doesn’t need to be challenged and assumes he or she knows all. And not only for themselves, but others too.

    This isn’t cute or commendable—it’s frightening.

    Your teenage and college years are when you are supposed to get a little crazy and experiment, but there has been some kind of weird Pilgrim backlash, in which people want to go back to the ideals and morals of the ’50s. Not the 1950s—more like the 1750s.
    This strikes me as odd.

    Think about it for a minute. Name one famous conservative person.

    There aren’t any except for politicians. Would Da Vinci, Picasso or Poe have been as brilliant as they were if they had been conservatives?

    Probably not, because if they were conservative, they wouldn’t have challenged the status quo.

    So while the narrow-minded and those afraid of change try to make liberal the worst insult in the world, they need to remember that they are worse.

    Because stagnant is a synonym for conservative.