There’s a lot of angst and negative energy going on right now over the political situation here in America. It’s caused a lot of grief among families; among friends. It’s hurt work relationships and neighborhood relationships and turned Facebook (which I use) and other social media (about which I’m clueless) into verbal battlefields where people unblock and then block and then reblock and it goes on and on and on.
I espouse the belief that if you do your homework, you can believe and vote any way you want. In other words, if you do your best to seek impartial information, however you interpret that information is up to you. I’m not afraid to talk to anyone with different beliefs or interpretations than my own, as long as it’s a respectful give and take and not just a session where two people turn up the volume. I will listen to your thoughts respectfully. I will try and ask intelligent, sometimes hard questions. I expect and encourage the same, and I won’t try and change your mind. Please don’t try to change mine.
Having said all that, I sat down and looked at my beliefs recently, and they are WAY different from the 25 year old Rob that I remember. That Rob was as conservative, Catholic, and Republican as any one who had ever walked the planet. I remember thinking thoughts like “We should use the military to patrol our borders,” and “If you don’t like what this country stands for, there’s the door.” I believed completely that we, the US, were the good guys, and we had a mission to keep the world in check and peaceful, because that’s what needed to be done and we were Americans, dammit. I was proud to be a member of the “strongest, most powerful military in the world,” and wouldn’t have minded us flexing that muscle if needed. I was for capital punishment, against abortion, and all about capitalism; if you worked hard, you should be rewarded, and you shouldn’t have to pay to help some lazy bum who made bad decisions get back on his feet.
Fifty-two-year-old me is a bit different. Not that there was anything particularly wrong with what I was thinking before; many of you reading this might resonate well with what’s above. But it was a way of thinking that reflected more what I was told and less of what I had experienced on my own (which, at twenty-five, wasn’t much). I had information, but I had yet to process that information or use that information in order to arrive at conclusions on how I actually felt about things. Also, I was TAUGHT that everyone was valuable, but I didn’t experience that value; virtually everyone I grew up with was just like me, and that became the norm and what was natural and right, and everyone else was outside that bubble and just a little less important.
I’ve definitely changed. Deployments, marriage, cancer, teaching, fatherhood…all these things have changed me in a way that for whatever reason makes me look at things differently.
Fifty-two-year-old me doesn’t think the US is always the good guys. Yes, we are a damn sight better than a lot of other countries, but we have our greed and our corruption and our bureaucracy and our biases just like everyone else. Fifty-two-year-old me isn’t itching to see our military go to war; I’m not a combat vet but I have seen what it did to some of my comrades and friends. I don’t want that to happen to the young people I have helped enter the military (as a JROTC instructor, it’s over 50 at this point) unless there is a really good reason.
Fifty-two-year-old me has learned about many of the other major religions in the world, and while I still respect Catholicism, I think there are some very valid points and beliefs in other religions that make me curious.
Fifty-two-year-old me recognizes that social programs (at least some of them) can be a good thing, if they are run properly and work to be a hand up instead of a handout. He also recognizes that capitalism can be a good thing, but that power corrupts, and there needs to be a balance that maybe we are losing sight of.
Many of my friends and acquaintances probably think I’ve lost my mind (and they might be right). But these “new” ideas that have supplanted the things I thought when I was twenty-five years old aren’t a danger to anyone. It’s not like I stand up in front of my cadets and tell them what to think; that’s not it at all.
I stand up and teach them about critical thinking, about trying to see both sides of an issue, about being fair, about integrity, and about treating people with respect not because they look like me or act like me but because they are people and deserve it. If they ask what I think about a particular issue (they do, sometimes), I always preface my response with, “Well, this is how I look at it, but I’m not telling you to think that way.” I explain my thought process and how I got there, and encourage them to take their own journey on whatever the subject is and reach their own conclusion. I like to think I don’t teach them what to think, I teach them how to think, and let them take it from there.
So those of you who think I’m off my rocker, don’t worry. I’m not making any “mini-me’s” out there (one of Rob is enough). What I hope I am doing, with my biological children and my cadets, is creating independent thinkers who aren’t going to hate someone different than them just because someone told them to. Unfortunately, recent events have taught me that those people are in shorter and shorter supply lately.
How have your values changed, and what do those changes make you do?
