When someone wants to insult me, he or she calls me a liberal. At first, I thought: “How dare they?” I am anything but liberal.

Maybe that was because I didn’t know exactly what a liberal was. Growing up in this society, liberalism always had negative connotations. Then I thought about it. A liberal is someone who calls for change and improvement. Why would being a liberal be a bad thing? Everyone says we are a nation of immigrants; we should be more open to different ideas because we have people from all over the world, from all cultures and religions. So all of us have different ideas and thoughts. Isn’t the intelligent, mature thing to do to hear each other out and reach some sort of compromise?

Liberalism is about changing things to make life better. Shouldn’t it therefore be appreciated? It has been the butt of jokes since the 1960s, when liberalism began to die. NIU history professor Williams Biles said that “because of the Vietnam-era protests, liberals must now defend themselves against the charge that they are not patriots: They are viewed as being weak on defense issues.”

That is the main argument conservatives bring up. They believe liberals are not standing for the American way of life; they are just a bunch of hippies who want to help the enemy. One learns early in life the enemy is anyone who isn’t American or, recently, even Americans who appear foreign.

Liberals, Biles said, have helped the civil rights movement, Social Security, Medicare and women’s rights issues. Conservatives are happy with the status quo; change is bad in their little bubble. If it were not for the liberals, the New Deal never would have taken place – and the New Deal has been responsible for a lot of social changes and governmental improvements.

But, hey, we don’t care about helping better our society and fixing the problems that plague us daily. We should be happy with the way things are. As of now, with conservatives in charge, all of our tax dollars are going to a war many of us don’t believe should have happened. Now there are tax cuts for the wealthy, and Social Security is withering away. Unemployment is increasing. Our civil liberties are being taken away from us to fight a “holy war,” as our great president put it. People are arrested for the most absurd charges. Some people are held in jail for an infinite period of time on no charges. We aid and abet countries that are on Amnesty International’s list of human rights violators.

So, if, after all this, one still can say that the status quo is good enough for us, then there is something very wrong with our society. We need change in our stuffy society in which the rich get everything and the poor get yelled at for not going out and finding jobs – jobs that pay minimum wage or a little more, definitely not enough to live off of. We need people to fight for our rights and protect us from the greedy politicians in Washington. Today’s politicians are businesspeople in disguise. We need people who have a more liberal way of thinking. We want to live in an atmosphere of change for the betterment and for the goodness of all humanity, not just a select few.

Bottom line, people: Liberalism is not a bad thing. The next time someone calls me a liberal, I’m going to thank that person for the compliment.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.