To the Editor:

I am a conservative. I conserve. A conservative wisely preserves, conserves and saves. A conservative secures and manages that which is available, to maintain or increase as possible or necessary, across all resources. 

As a child of the depression and the World War that followed, I learned to conserve. Everyone did. As a young wife and mother in later years, putting into practice the lessons of my youth, I sometimes made wrong choices by selecting what I thought was the wise, less expensive product or action. In the long run I would sometimes find that my conservative selection was more costly, and was not an effective choice to meet my goals. And so I learned.  

Learning is something that our present day self-described “conservatives” apparently either cannot or refuse to do. Giving lip service to the word “conserve” as an interchangeable for “savings” does not result in actual long-term savings on any level — local, state, or national.

Cutting programs simply due to their expense does not relieve the oft-threatened future burdens to our children. Without real thought, or perhaps necessary judicious trimming, you are ultimately increasing the problems these cut programs help solve. 

Numerous published reports by verifiably non-partisan research agencies are willfully ignored and discounted by bluster and public ballyhoo. Certified fiscal records (past and projected) that disprove the numerous willfully false claims and clearly misapplied conservation are blithely dismissed as “fake.”  

So, even though you mislabel me and those who share more humane positions which actually result in both human and fiscal savings, we so-called liberals ultimately are, by more accurately applied definition, the “truly conservative.”

Shirley Ches

Franklin