A Click n Paste from another board....
*Confessions of an EX-Liberal*
When I was young I was crazy. I was rebellious. I was a snob. I hated authority. It all accelerated when I went to college, and I started taking part in life as an acknowledged adult. I was enamored with my new status, and aggressively participated in my new discovery of politics, believing I could truly make a difference. But having some education, I soon discovered that many of the people I was arguing with outside of school were functionally illiterate, and that changed me. It made me feel superior to them, and I behaved badly when addressing them, focusing on their literary mistakes and regional dialect with a method of ridiculing attack to discredit, rather than confront their substance directly. I found that I could easily manipulate these simple people and that reinforced my feelings of superiority. I was caught-up in a whirl of egotism, and gravitated toward the group that I identified with most, the Liberals. Their elitist snobbery attracted me the most, although I did not realize it at the time. I envied their self-importance. They accepted me with open arms, and I emulated them as best as I could for a long time, feeling satisfied I was among the best of the best. It was years later when I finally realized that I had allied myself with a party of illusion, snobbery, ego, vanity, and irresponsibility, and that I had fooled myself. The disillusionment was pervasive, and my life began to change. I began to admit how foolish and naive my younger self was, an admission I would never have been able to make as a devout Liberal, but one I found most mature adults made upon leaving their twenties. I became humble, and stopped bragging about my intellect, an intellect which seemed hollow for the first time in my life. I suppressed the Pavlovian impulse to rebel, and I abandoned silly conspiracy theories that I had relied upon as truth for years, understanding that I had even invented some of them myself, unconsciously, as a defense mechanism in debate. Finally, and most importantly, I began taking responsibility for my own actions, and improved on my newly discovered hypocritical tendencies. At that moment an epiphany was impressed upon me...that I was no longer a Liberal, and that leaving that absurd ideology behind opened a world of opportunity I could never have previously imagined. That was twenty years ago. My life has seen nothing but success from that day forward. I laugh when I see many of the posts here from Liberals, as one would laugh at a younger, immature self.