First, the best way to show respect is to understand what they were fighting for in the first place and to support all of them all the time. It floors me that many don't get the idea of freedom and in reality many don't know that there is a war going on.
The sad thing is, our leadership in our federal government has made it out that our country is so weak that we must do this or that “RIGHT NOW” unless we want to end up with a depression – WHAT A LIE. It is sad that we put so much into one man who has never been able to prove himself with any endeavor. We already forgot 9.11, we don't see anything but the protests (what remains of them) and because our messiah has arrived, we have other things to worry about. We are amazed that we will have a memorial to a man who espoused peace and equality not by the nature of one's skin color but by the character of the person at the same time we elected our first black president. We have our media who lets us focus on the American idol contestants and give awards to undeserving people like Katie Couric. We cry for the journalist who lost their lives while doing nothing for our country at all, the same people who **** our country every chance they get, who undercut the people who are defending it while saying they are world citizens first.
Our country is so strong that we are fighting a way on two fronts and our lives has not been impacted at all as a country. We go along like it was just another day while others put their lives on the line for us.
Ok to answer the question, I'm a classic liberal, I know that sounds weird, but it is something like a libertarian but not.
I believe in the individual, their rights and especially property rights. I also believe that government serves a purpose, a small purpose – this includes protecting the country, regulating things between the states and ensuring uniformed means of conducting business among a few other things (roads). The governments job is not to regulate the stock market, the banks or anything else other than what they are allowed to do. It is not the governments job to have mass transit, regulate the skies or the air waves.
It is simple, I believe in opportunity to succeed or fail on my own accord and to be able to do it the way I want to. With todays government, I can not even approach attempting another success or fail try and only see that the inept and stupid will get more handed to them which makes it worst for all of us in the long run.
Libertarians don't really believe in government, from what I have learned through the years they want to see it eliminated or reduced at least to an ineffective entity, like Ron Paul's idea of no taxes. The hard reality is we need some taxes to run the government and because we don't have the manufacturing base, or an economy to serve as a foundation for that base, we can't depend on tariffs and duties to support the government like we did until 1913.
Also unlike a libertarian, classic liberals seem to believe in responsibility and accountability of the individual when it comes down to how it effects others, drugs and drinking are not freedoms to me – I have seen too many screwed up individuals in my life time to see what freedom does to one who is incapable of understanding the responsibilities of freedom. We seem to also believe in moral responsibilities towards my fellow citizens, which I have proven countless times in my life.
Liberalism of the 19th century (classic liberalism) was one where the government didn't provide help to victims, there was no FEMA and should never be. It produced some of the most effective charity work, citizen helping citizen style of charity without any government intervention. The reality of today is that most of our business structure, and businesses got their starts under the classic liberal ideals of the 19th century. There is no way that we could have the companies like GE, GM, Ford, US Steel, and so on under today's economic conditions. We would never see the innovations we saw in the first half of the century and we would never see the people like Ford, Westinghouse, Durant and others who gave millions to people to help others out. We don't know what it was like during those times, when people actually were parts of communities and cared.
Most of what we know today was started in the late 19th century brought over by the immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe. The one person who seems to have done a lot when he got into office was TR, not because he thought that government should be all powerful but because he spent time in Europe and was enlighten by the ideals borne out of class warfare over there. TR did some good, not a lot but some by enforcing laws that were passed before he got into office. I don't buy into the standard oil anti-trust suit simply because we have no applied those same laws to companies that have actually caused us economic harm. One thing that TR was ****ed about when Taft got into office was Taft's stopping a lot of progressive legislation from being enacted. When there was a split between Taft and TR, Wilson got in (like Clinton) and this is where we started to redefine liberalism. FDR took it a step further by openly attacking people and their ideals, like Andrew Mellon who he went after with the IRS.
Through the years we have thought of the government as the one who gives us our rights, which is the opposite. History was re-written in the 50's by the teachers who listened to the government experts and today we have people dumb enough to think that the president is the most important person in our government.
Hope that gives you an idea what the differences are and where I am coming from.
