I haven’t always been a Liberal.
I thought I was a Democrat in my teen years because my mother was a Democrat but I had no idea what that meant other than fealty to family. I had no idea what politics meant and I didn’t care to know. Talk of it was boring and confusing. I had better things to do: Cruise town. Chase girls. Drink beer. School was incidental and college was out of reach both academically and financially. I did, however, manage to graduate, barely, and get myself drafted four months later. Even after having done a tour in Vietnam as an infantryman, I was still politically ambivalent. I was drafted under President Johnson and returned from Vietnam under President Nixon, who, just a few months later, faced Watergate. I wasn’t interested in that, either. Making it home from Vietnam alive and intact was enough. I wanted to be left alone and carve what I could out of the so-called “American Dream.” I went to work right away in a dust-choked plywood mill. Married my high school sweetheart, built a house, and had a baby girl—all just in time for the 1973-1975 Recession, which found me furloughed from work off and on, but mostly off, for two years. I took pay cuts, too. Taxes until then had seemed a matter of course but now brought paycheck deductions into sharp relief, and I imbibed the angst of my co-workers who attributed those deductions as money going to those who didn't work. Period. My family and I struggled immensely: We took small loans from family to make monthly ends meet, signed up for food stamps, and got a little unsolicited help from church members. (I was a recent Christian convert, which I’d hoped would soothe my napalm scorched spirit and which seemed an integral part of the American Dream ala God and Country). Although thankful for the help, I was embarrassed to take handouts because as an American I valued the independence that was supposed to come with “The Dream” that was crumbling before me—not to mention that I was reluctantly thrust into the line of those freeloaders.
Although Nixon was largely responsible for the Recession, its full effects culminated under President Jimmy Carter, who was a Democrat, and he, of course, took the blame. Although I didn’t know the particulars of why he was blamed, I blindingly went along with the scuttlebutt from my rural, provincial community—my co-workers, my friends, my extended family, the local press, and, to my surprise, my church. The pastor preached Jesus alongside Ronald Reagan, which bedeviled me. President Carter was a devout Christian, too. There was, however, a small, discreet space in the back of my mind that pitied President Carter and, although I would never admit it because I wanted to “belong,” I couldn’t find anything about him that I disliked. I had always tried to resist disliking someone on the premise that others did.
Despite my inklings, I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, the first time I had ever voted, and I felt good about it—about the voting, I mean. Becoming a card-carrying Conservative was as remarkable as breathing air. In my environs, it’s just what you did without question, like fish who don’t question the water they swim in. But how do you get out of the water, so to speak, to question your inherited and inculcated ideological and religious beliefs in order to investigate the world from another point-of-view, which requires time, patience, and the long-suffering that often accompanies the newfound pariah in one’s family, community, and, more crucially, in one’s own mind?
For me it was education. Although I didn’t feel like college material, I had a yearning to learn, to know more. There was an immense world out there that beckoned, but my ignorance kept it at bay and I felt stupid, an obviously awful feeling but one that motivated me to sign up for a math course at a local community college. On that first day of class, I sat in my car and watched students much younger than I rush to classes under a hard spring rain. I was terrified and wanted to leave. “This isn’t me,” I thought. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” But I mustered up the courage and went to the class—and that was it. I got hooked on learning. Over a ten-year period (I had to work, too) I earned a Bachelor’s Degree in English, a Master’s Degree in Education, and became a high school English teacher, which came with the added benefit of being a student, too. As the Roman philosopher, Seneca, said, “While we teach, we learn.”
I didn’t see education as completing a menu of required subjects to reach a particular goal. I fell into English as a major because I loved to read and write, latent passions my mother had bequeathed me. I had no idea what I wanted to do after college. I simply went to learn and to widen my experience and worldview, to test what I had previously known by habit and endowment against a sea of previously unknown new and exciting ideas, which necessarily required learning the most vital of skills: critical thinking. Going for a better job seemed a sacrilege. I had a job. It paid the bills. I had enough stuff.
Traveling widely also brought me out of the Sargasso of ignorance. I went to teach abroad—in Poland, Kuwait, China, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and visited at least twenty other countries. I saw the Pyramids, Eiffel Tower, Coliseum, Sistine Chapel, Acropolis, Berlin Wall, Auschwitz, Taj Mahal, Great Wall, London Tower, Petra, and many other touristy sites. However, I did not consider myself a tourist as much as I did a student out to learn more about the world, lessons which came to me through numerous conversations with myriad people from different cultures—conversations in classrooms, on street corners, in pubs and restaurants, in airports, at historical sites, and anywhere the opportunity afforded. Despite the conservative angst of “Other,” I was astonished and enlightened when I discovered that people from different cultures (and different religions) were always kind, respectful, and just as eager to know me as I was to know them. During my travels, I was never once accosted or disparaged. I was only ever treated with kindness and respect—and the concepts of national borders, the Other, and “enemy” as I once interpreted them vanished by degrees from my mind.
As did my religion, which ebbed away when I learned to think critically, when I learned to evaluate information objectively and to question that information in the light of Reason. I suppose I was around eight years old when I questioned how a fat man loaded with a bag of toys, which seemed paltry little for all the world’s children, could squeeze down the narrow chimneys of myriad homes scattered across the world in the space of one night, or how the same fat man could stay aloft in a flimsy sleigh pulled by reindeer whose only means of propulsion seemed to be in their hooves. I remember wanting an elephant—a real elephant—one Christmas. Why didn’t I get it? After all, I was good enough to get a baseball mitt. Losing those childish myths wasn’t as difficult as losing my religion. Those myths were delightful and didn’t come with fear of eternal damnation or the exile of an unbeliever, as II Corinthians 6:14 commands, “Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers.”
The tribalism of Christianity, which seems to focus more on membership and money than on peace and love, has a strong primal pull—until maturity ushers in Reason and when Reason, by turns, resolves cognitive dissonance. I could no longer believe that the Universe was created six thousand years ago by a creator who did it in seven days when, in fact, the Universe is fourteen billion years old; I could no longer believe that a creator formed human beings from dust when, if fact, all life forms on Earth evolved from single-celled organisms that lived 3.5 billion years ago; I could no longer believe that Noah loaded a big boat with two of all the animals on Earth given that there were approximately eight million species of land animals at the time, not to mention that dinosaurs would have to have been in the mix. Preposterous stories like these persist in the New Testament: turning water into wine, raising people from the dead, casting demons into pigs, feeding five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish, healing the blind in an instant, walking on water, et al.
I respect a person’s right to believe in whatever religion (all 4,300 of them) they choose so long as that relationship remains personal and out of the political arena, particularly Christianity which seems to congregate on the Right side. The union of religion and politics throughout history has resulted in at least one hundred twenty-six bloody wars, conquests, and genocides at a cost of approximately one hundred ninety-five million lives. How that needless slaughter of innocent people squares with Christianity defies Reason unless its adherents engage “willful ignorance,” and I think they must in order to ward off the legion of disturbing truths that violate their beliefs: Done enough, swatting away such pesky disturbances becomes less than annoying and eventually axiomatic. Belief remains unassailed or, for the neophyte, a new and strange kind of quixotic reality unfolds, like when reading a Harry Potter novel, which, oddly enough, became a kind of benign religion to many young people.
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