How I Realized I’m A Conservative

[Geee]

The Federalist:

Although I grew up in a union household and surrounded by progressive peers, I kept noticing liberal policies sound good but actually reinforce poor choices. It dawned on me: I’m a conservative.

 

In the late 1970s, I went to an experimental high school. Most of the students were some form of nature-loving hippie. Not the raw, shocking, and rude kind of the true hippie era, more of the granola-eating, yogurt-making, calico-and-work-boot-wearing kind, but still dabbling in some risky sex and drugs.

 

These hippies were mostly the children of wealthy progressive parents who had purchased immense Roland Park mansions with their trust funds and who raised their children by the most progressive paradigms. Most of the rest were rock-n-roll drug addicts. A few of us, children of working-class parents attending the school on scholarship, were a little closer to normal. I came from an educated working-class family, and am daughter of a public-school teacher.

 

I remember some of the students sitting around one afternoon talking about the beauty of Native Americans and their respect for nature, recounting that, when the natives killed an animal, they first prayed to thank gods, ancestors, or perhaps the animal itself. My schoolmates talked about how the natives honored the animal they had killed by using every part, wasting none: the meat for food, the skin for clothes, the bones for tools and jewelry, the sinew for bindings and cords, and the hooves for rattles and bells. I could feel the awe this inspired in my fellow classmates. They felt enlightened, that a truth was revealed.

My First Encounter with Liberal Hypocrisy

The next morning, I brought a scrapple sandwich to school for breakfast. A friend, who was indeed wearing a calico skirt with long johns and work boots (although no deodorant) leaned over to me and asked, “What ’cha eating?”

 

“Scrapple,” I replied.

 

“Eww! That’s disgusting! Do you know what they put in that stuff?” Thus the Scrapple Theory was born to me at the tender age of 16.