You will have seen it often, I'm sure, trotted out by the Republican Party and its apologists in the media -- "A man who is not liberal as a youth is hard in the heart. One who is not a conservative when older is soft in the head." Apparently Winston Churchill first said it, and it is used now to put down anyone who is concerned about conservation, or globalization, or social services, or Native Americans, or global warming, or Iraq, or public health, or privatization, or aged care, or outsourcing, or public education, or workplace relations, or free trade agreements. It is used in exactly the same way as a stern father would speak to a teenager who wasn't following father's beliefs about something. The father, you see, is always right, the young always wrong. And in the same way (you see how clever this is?) the conservative parties are the grown ups who are always right; the parties of the left, the 'small-l liberals' are children who are always wrong.
George Bernard Shaw had a much more accurate version of this -- "If you are not a red revolutionist at 20, you will be at 50 a most impossible fossil". Just think of the fossils in conservative parties and you will see how accurate this is (and remember, George Bush was never a revolutionist at 20, never even a small-l liberal at 20). Conservative at 20, fossilized at 50. So we on the left should begin to use this Shaw version. The parties of the left are the young at heart who are flexible minded, educated, interested in the world around them (you see how clever this is?), and are always right; the conservative parties are the stick in the mud, inflexible, incurious, old in mind who are always wrong.
But here is my even better version of this slogan -- 'A man who is not liberal as a youth is hard in the heart. One who is not a conservationist when older hasn't being paying attention'. Not much attention being paid to the environment by the government and its supporters. Supporting coal and oil, that ancient fossilized vegetation; and nuclear power, the fossilized dream of the fifties that had already become a nightmare in the sixties; are sure signs of fossilized minds
Just as well we aging (as Trotsky once said -- "Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man") revolutionaries are still here, isn't it?
Ibsen said "It's not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It's all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It's not that they actually live on us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them." Visit me at The Watermelon Blog and watch me try to get rid of them.