I Used To Be a Liberal. . .

I was born in the 50’s and graduated from high school in the 70’s. I’m from the era of Billy Jack. Do I need to say more?

My senior year of high school I stuffed paper boxes for McGovern. I’m sure my mom and dad thought I had flipped a lid. When I told them it was for extra credit, they didn’t say a word. Although I was pretty consistently an A-B student, they weren’t going to argue with “extra credit.” Heck, they even paid for the gas!

Do you know…I had no idea how liberal I really was? On the one hand I abhorred the thought of abortion, but I have written proof of a letter written to the editor of a newspaper about how teen pregnancy ruins the life of so many people, from the baby right on through the grandparents of the mother. Of course there were no alternatives or options given to abortion—I’m not sure there were that many or that I was aware of them if there were. My grandmother was so proud of me for being published in the paper that she put it in my scrapbook! How is that for a memory coming back to haunt you?

My parents didn’t talk about politics or current controversial affairs much, although looking back they always voted pretty conservatively. The only exception was Carter—the peanut farmer. To this day, my mother will talk about the traitorous peanut farmer who stabbed the Virginia peanut farmers in the back. It was the last time she voted for a Democrat—me too, actually. It was the first time I could vote.

I remember when Rush Limbaugh first came to the radio scene. To some of us he was a breath of fresh air, expressing ideas that we felt but never heard anyone on any of the airways communicate. He was brash, in your face, shocking in his methods, but he sounded truthful to us because he expressed something publicly that we felt privately. No one else was expressing those views with such success. We were thoroughly entertained by it. Then I was unpleasantly shocked to find that my intelligence was questioned because I listened to him and found him entertaining.

It wasn’t long before I was learning about hate—in America. I never paid much attention to it before. It seemed to me that it was just “freedom of speech” and that freedom included the right to fly flags, burn flags, pledge to flags, pray, worship…I can’t even list the freedoms there are so many we are given. Men and women of all faiths died to give us those freedoms. I understand we have the freedom to hate—but as a Christian I do not have that freedom.

Why this diatribe? I’ve been thinking lately that what might work us up is what we are digesting. Newspapers, magazines, Internet, television, and radio all set us up to digest emotion. Evidently emotion is now a commodity. Do we want to contribute to the culture in such a way that we sell ourselves totally to the information age and its offerings? In February I went to a great seminar a friend of mine presented in which she suggested a Sabbath from “gadgetry,” or technology. Another of my friends expressed it this way in one of his weekly newspaper articles:

Rex Alphin: Information Proclamation

I’m going to try the concept. I think it will be a good exercise in realizing how dependent, how addicted we have become to information.

As for being liberal or conservative, I’m not sure exactly where I stand politically anymore. I suppose I’m somewhere in between, constantly looking for someone, anyone who speaks a shred of truth. I think we’ll need more than a Sabbath to figure that one out.