Brunch with a Conservative

I had brunch today with my friend Austin and his dad Lyle who is a hard core conservative. It got a heated in a few places, but I knew there was no way I was going to change his mind about anything, so I simply stated my side of the issues. His basic attitude was this is what is wrong with America and this how Democrats caused that to happen. It was not as much frustrating as informative in that I saw someone who had a completely opposite attitude on the nature of government and the form and function of said government. Many of the things he said seemed to come straight from Fox News, fear of illegal immigrants, Acorn, welfare, and all other abuses of the system, but unlike some people I know, Fox News merely validated his already existing attitudes as opposed to being strictly a source of information. You would think there are a lot reasons for this with generational and life experience being two obvious things that would lead to such drastic differences of opinion. I guess with someone like Lyle he sees America as a vastly different place that what he grew up in. While you could say there have been different programs that have helped equalize inequalities and provided a social safety net to certain groups of people, it has also lead to a lot of abuse of the system. For a lot of people of his generation all they see is the abuse of the system instead of people that have been helped. I guess in a lot of ways this is a microcosm of the national debate that is currently going, and some of the issues we face in the next few years. Right now both sides are dug in and we really need to find a way to work together to come with some solutions long term. It made for interesting conversation and greatly delighted Austin who likes playing devil's advocate with both of us and saw this as some kind of showdown of two people he knows with different views of things.