My father ever put duty above all else, even honor. I personally have always placed compassion above duty, something he considered a heinous flaw and the root cause of our nations lost power and prestige. If we jointly do share any one single realization it is an absolute belief in the natural construct, the fundamental unchangeability of the predisposed universal order under any circumstance.
As an adolescent, and much to my paternal grandmothers distain, father had become an ardent follower of Trotsky and even dabbled in the now wholly disproved theories of Eugenics, had fought on the streets of London and in the countryside of Spain against the rising menace of Fascism, happily risking life and limb in pursuit of what he perceived to be humanities true utopian goal. Eventually disappointed by communisms inability to meld any kind of fruitful alliance to combat the contagion of extreme right wing politics he felt forced to return wholeheartedly into the arms of those still ostracized figures, including a very radical and outspoken Winston Churchill still largely ostracized by the political elite after the debacles of Sidney street and Gallipoli, who were correctly predicting the terrible events that would fracture the globe but a few years later.
The move from an extremely left-wing position to an almost slavish conservative creed, based somewhat loosely around British exceptionalism and Edwardian nationalistic jingoism, took but a moment of time, helped along by the pressure of expanding unemployment, falling economic promise, and rising social unrest. Populist conservative movements are ever thus, concentrated and focused by the fear of extremism advancing from either end of the political spectrum, the economic failings of social Marxism at one end of the seesaw, and the wholly predictable violence, oppression, and racism of fascism as the other. Latterly we both moved towards the center, settling side by side into the uncomfortable cushions of neo-socialism, warm and cuddly enough to be welcoming, but strident enough to survive constant disappointment and human failure.
Daily Abstract Thoughts 