Yes, this is somewhat of a confession. Actually, I never haven't been liberal. I am just a liberal who had quite different life experiences and who experienced them through a quite different perspective. I was already an atheist by the time I reached middle school. I remember the exact moment I lost my faith, and I was very young then. I remember walking out of chapel thinking that life seemed a lot dimmer than it did before. It's sad, really. Yet, I was a child and naturally unable to disagree with the world-view of my superiors. So I repressed this knowledge, but it was not like I did not know it after that.
Once I reached high school, well that was the death-knell for any conservatism I may have once had, since I started to think differently, more abstractly, and I had access to authors like Richard Dawkins, or even to a proper biology textbook. I mean, seriously, I think my having been put into such a restrictive environment as a kid drove my love of science. You've heard that you don't know what you're taking for granted until you don't have it anymore. Well, it works the other way, too. You don't know what you have unless there was a time when you lacked it.
Of course, just like I was doing here, I toyed around with pretending. I did it so well I confused myself about my own history a couple of times. But in the end, no. Of course not. I am not conservative at all. I never was, and honestly, I think that's how I ended up in such a different place to begin with. It's like my conservative family reacted against my liberalism and put me in the place they thought I would be least likely to escape. Conservatives have been trained to crush free spirited children.
Or maybe I was just a spazz. I dunno. That's still not entirely clear. I know I asked my brother if he wanted to be gay or married when he grew up, and my dad went to yell at the principal. He came home telling my brother (who resented me for a long time for this) and I that we would be attending a Christian school the following year.
Why was I told officially we were going to switch schools? My mom told me I was having trouble learning to read. So, if that's not true, it's sort of a mean thing to say, I think. But why would they have moved my brother if that was the case? And considering that I went from the 1st to the 8th grade reading level in one year after the transition, I'm not sure it was entirely true that I did not learn how to read in the slightest. I mean, that would have had to be one hell of a new program. Why wouldn't the public school system just copy the hell out of it? I find it hard to believe that Fellowship Christian Academy had and may still possess secretly the elusive and eureka-inspiring answer for teaching kids to read.
I do not know , but I view one opinion as being fairly undeniable.
If I had continued in public school, I don't think my understanding of conservatives would have extended beyond a 2nd or 3rd grade memory. I am really not very conservative at all. I would have gone *NUTS* given even an ounce of freedom. (Maybe my parents were prescient in this regard.) In fact, how I define my conservatism is based on some scientific data I read regarding potential neuroanatomical origins of conservatism. (I reject the idea that it is purely a problem with intelligence.) So I would often say things to indicate I have an anxiety disorder (an easy thing to fake when you don't have many friends and you suspect the world may be in peril), and I would even have to concede that I tend to hang onto prejudices more than Liberals. (That should have been a dead give away right there, since ain't no way a true conservative will admit he is prejudiced. He or she is, in fact, too prejudiced to do so.)
I guess I am just admitting this because I just don't want to have to pretend anymore. I thought about continuing to pretend for the long haul in order to get conservatives to listen, but it's just too depressing. I would rather be loved by the community, and I know that no double-agent honestly could be.
Liberals are not "taking over" science, the media, goverment, and etc because they are evil and want to ruin your way of life. They are doing it because the world has real serious problems that people never think about when they believe they are going to Heaven. We are afraid, and I can only imagine how stiff the competition must be in order to become a liberal cultural figure. That explains why all the comedians are liberals, right?
If you are a liberal and you can get people to listen to you, you do it by any means necessary. I guess I tried that and went a little too far. It doesn't help that most people, liberal or otherwise, were not very nice to me from highschool onwards until quite recently. Perhaps it was a bit my fault for not just trying to fit in, but at the same time I had been taught to be principled, and by golly, I was going to be principled. You know? From that position it can take a few turns to come to the final conclusion that one just ought not pretend to be conservative. There's more negative in it than positive.
And if you want to ever have the hope of affecting any positive change at all in society, well you had better be a liberal. To do so being a conservative, presumably you would have to become a dictator first. I do not seriously imagine this happening for me. But believe it or not, I considered that, too. You know? How do you become one? Maybe you just become one by acting like one at exactly the right time and by doing all the right things as they come up.
P.S. I didn't care about using the Jews as bait because fuck religion.
No comments:
Post a Comment