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I've found you all to be very nice here, much nicer than I had previously imagined. This is not an easy post to write but I have come to respect a lot of you here and thus feel I ought to be candid in answering your questions.
I am twenty four years old, which means I suppose much of my problem was the result of the ignorance of youth coupled with a naivety one can only possess at these years of one's life. I moved around quite a lot while I was growing up and often went through times where I did not have many friends. Long story short, this led me to a period of spiritual searching, during which I became Catholic.
Being young, and foolish, I embraced much of what the more conservative Catholics and apologists for the Church said at face value. I had embraced much of what they taught as my own core values. In fact, I even considered becoming a priest for a while. Not having much experience in life, I was highly judgemental of others, about on the same level as one would expect of a Fundamentalist of sorts. I suppose it was a form of rebellion, considering that my family was rather liberal in its outlook.
It was really only a matter of time before I started listening to Limbaugh. I was young and impressionable. As a young enthusiastic Catholic convert who wanted to change the world, and saw it "filled with sin", so to speak, it was very easy to accept a scapegoat. People like Rush offered a group to blame: namely, "liberals" abd "liberalism". It was the "liberals" who went out dismantling sexual mores while promoting abortion. It was the "liberals" who ignored the Constitution. "Democrats" were just a bunch of wealthy elitists who looked down on the rest of society while finding ways to keep them down through higher taxes. "The Clintons" were responsible for most of our woes, both foreign and domestic.
Now I will make a confession that I am a bit nervous to make. I was not just a Republican, but a rather dogmatic one at that. I was a FReeper. I would like to think that I was one of the more "reasonable" ones (I avoided flame wars like the plague and meticulously avoided using ad hominem), but I am not entirely sure how possible that is on a site like that, looking back. I joined that site back in 2001, before 9/11. I engaged in quite a few "troll hunts" and "zot threads" and the such. I can't say I'm completely proud of it.
It was a slow and subtle process. I embraced that way of thought based on the initial premises I held when I first decided I was a "conservative". As a Republican, I really believed that I was supporting freedom, albeit within "moral guidelines" (translated into English, that means I opposed abortion rights, civil unions, and basically anything of which I did not approve - how is that for freedom?). I was a self described "pure capitalist". I considered social programs to be a waste of money and harmful to the efficiency of the economy. Lovely stuff.
My first discomforts with being a conservative came after 9/11, when FReepers began to call for bombing of Mecca and the rest of the Middle East. It never quite struck me as American to brutally kill innocent civilians to somehow stop attacks on innocent civilians. Still, I dismissed such ramblings as proceeding from emotion and did not waiver in my support for Bush.
When the time for the war in Iraq came about, I supported that too. I didn't support it because I thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or because I believed that Iraq had financed the 9/11 attacks, but rather because I had long believed Saddam Hussein to be a monster that had to be removed from office. Until about a year ago or so, I was quite vocal in my classrooms when it came to supporting the war. Looking back, I see it as a grave mistake that has led to the senseless destruction of lives.
As I grew older, and gained a bit more experience in the world, I began to move away from some of those earlier premises that led to me becoming a conservative. I suppose that having sex, for example, does wonders in removing one's harshly judgemental attitudes about "waiting for marriage" ;)! I dealt with a girlfriend that could best be described as a "serial liar", which taught me that it is foolish and harmful to trust someone simply because you think you "know" them. I began to actually listen to liberals instead of simply dismiss them from the outset, which is a great way to realize that half the country isn't devoted to the downfall of society like you thought them to be!
My political thought has shifted a bit over the past year. While I was devoted to unregulated capitalism, I saw economic efficiency as among the greatest goods. A question, though: what good is economic efficiency when policies are in place that only allow a small percentage of society to enjoy it? Society does best when everyone is given the opportunity to succeed. Granted, success ultimately lies within and with what one does with that opportunity, but it strikes me as fundamentally wrong that some never get the chance in the first place. Furthermore, I've come to realize that seeing things that way does not make me a "Marxist" per se (of course, I've also come to see that most Marxists are not the rotten people I had earlier believed them to be!) In short, a big part of what snapped me out of the mindset I was in was when I stopped saying, "This cannot be done" and started asking, "How can we do these things to make life better for everyone?"
As a Republican, I was under the mistaken notion that I was supporting small government. In retrospect, I can see how gravely mistaken I was: there is nothing "small government" about the Republican Party. It is perhaps only recently that I began paying attention to how much they really play on people's fears to build the most insidious "big government" programs this country has ever seen! I also began to see that liberalism does not necessarily support big government. Liberals have traditionally championed government programs, but those programs have been responsible for empowering individuals to take control of their own lives! They say that if you give a man a fish he will eat well for a day, but if you teach that man how to fish, he will eat well his entire life... but what good is knowing how to fish if you don't have a fishing pole, and your only option is to go work for the fishing company down the road that only gives you enough in exchange for your labor to get a day's worth of food?
As for where I am now? I stopped going to Church on a regular basis about a year or two ago. I considered myself Catholic in name for a while, but I don't even know if I am that anymore. I'd best describe myself as a deist now. Perhaps God is best known by studying the world around us, and the best miracles are those that come about when we serve eachother. It's a much more "liberating" view of the world. I don't have a problem with civil unions anymore (let's face it, it's a legal necessity). The hardest issue for me is abortion, but I suppose part of what opened my mind in the first place was in realizing that the best way to deal with that issue is to educate people, to provide solutions for women that want to have the child but cannot afford to do so, and to simply not worry about what women decide to do with their own bodies. I might not like it but it is their own choice.
At any rate, I apologize for the length of this post. Many of these thoughts were a long time coming and I simply wanted the opportunity to put them forward. As I said earlier, I am enjoying this site quite a bit so far. I only hope I can be a valuable contributor here. :)
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