At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
I've discovered two advantages over the past couple of weeks to a monastic lifestyle. The first is that I don't have to get dressed until the pizza truck arrives with breakfast around 4 PM. The other is that I have plenty of time to think. I've been ruminating quite a bit on the state of our culture based on a part time gig I have as a substitute teacher at a local charter school. The curriculum is the usual tripe consisting of diversity studies, multi-culti awareness, and gender studies. The good news is that the twaddle apparently lacks adhesion. "Yeah, right, whatever," seems to be a common response from the students. You see, kids simply aren't politically aware at fourteen, sixteen or even eighteen. I wasn't either at their age. I didn't become politically aware until my life experience gave me a reason to think about politics. The prompt didn't arrive until I was in my early 30's. In my case it was seeing Nicaragua under the Sandinista government circa 1986. So what about you? When did you become politically aware and why?
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Jul '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
Bay of Pigs. I was 11. I grew up around men who had gone off to WW2. When Bay of Pigs happened, I realized instantly that there were two kinds of Americans - men of honor and men who would betray men of honor.
Jun '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
I can understand that teenagers don't typically have the wherewithal to formulate robust political ideals, but I do feel that things really started for me while going to high school during the Reagan era. We were constantly bombarded (pun actually accidental) with unilateral disarmament and nuclear freeze talk. I just remember sitting there saying, "this just doesn't sound right." I turned 18 in 1984 and burst with pride as I cast my ballot for Reagan. Not a bad way to start. I didn't start poring through Wealth of Nations or The Road to Serfdom, but I did stay reasonably politically engaged until my 30's. I knew what I believed and why, but never felt that politics was a central focus in my life. However, when September 11th happened, my whole world changed. I've dived in with both feet ever since.
Aug '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
Politically aware? Superficially, you could say I was from an early age, but I'm not sure whether the superficial counts.
I come from a bizarre family -- who thought it was appropriate to give a ten year old Ayn Rand novels. It's not. Even if the ten year is unusually bright.
Just one brush with one of the more, umm, intimate scenes in a Rand novel is enough to give the child that uneasy feeling that all adults must be perverts... Anyhow, it made the books impossible for me to finish at that age.
When I was 12, my mother (a lawyer) made sure I had read the whole Constitution; at age 13, she started me on the Federalist papers. Neither of these were as scary as a Randian fantasy, but at that age, I still had too little experience with fallible, limited human nature to understand why the Founders' ideas were so exceptionally wise.
We would be fools to accept limits on human nature if we didn't have to. And I think for most of us, lived experience most effectively teaches us where those limits are. It's no surprise that political awareness takes time to develop.
Edited on Dec 16, 2010 at 9:05pmMay '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
As Cary Grant says in A Bishop's Wife, "Some people are born young." I was born old. I've payed attention to politics at least since I watched the Berlin Wall come down on TV when I was nine. Of course, that doesn't mean I remember any of it.
Jun '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
Yeah, I imagine Howard Roark is probably not the best way to formulate your Prince Charming, especially at ten!
Midget Faded Rattlesnake:
I come from a bizarre family -- who thought it was appropriate to give a ten year old Ayn Rand novels. It's not. Even if the ten year is unusually bright.
Just one brush with one of the more, umm, intimate scenes in a Rand novel is enough to give the child that uneasy feeling that all adults must be perverts... Anyhow, it made the books impossible for me to finish at that age.
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
MFR, your response is hilarious and all too accurate. Rand is probably a part of the canon that everyone on the right should be exposed too, but it's not the place to start, especially in pre-adolescence. I've always thought Rand answers the age-old question "What would it be like if Nietzsche chaired the Libertarian Party?" (and yes, I know Randians hate this characterization).
I first tuned in during the 1992 presidential election, when I was delighted by how much Ross Perot tweaked the establishment. While I couldn't sign off on Perot these days, I still have an evergreen love of those who live to torment the Beltway. BTW, the greatest casualty of the Perot campaign was his running mate, James Stockdale, who came to be characterized as a dotty old fool. He was as good a citizen as America produces, and you should all at least read his Wikipedia bio if you're not aware of that fact.
May '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
November 22, 1963. Horrified someone -- an American! -- would kill the President. Of course, it had happened before (I knew about Lincoln, not Garfield or McKinley), but not in a very long time. Why had it happened? What next? Ah, Vietnam . . . <sigh>
Started reading the paper through, not just the comics and sports. History books and more mature magazines than "Highlights"
May '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
Darn it! I was almost ten in November 1963 . . . (should have previewed)
Dec '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
"Politically aware" has been a long, gradual process. And there's much left to go, indeed. Here are the landmark moments (I'm 26 now, for reference):
I was in college when President Bush announced military action in Iraq. The next day some hyper-political group handed out white flowers with a poem attached to it about peace. I proudly accepted the flower, but felt some sort of icky guilt the instant I clutched it....the seeds of my conservatism.
I later found myself obnoxiously ranting to friends about how I'm sick of being made to feel guilty for my race...sprouts?
When the Hillary/Obama debate came to Cleveland, I went to a watch party down the road from the debate at a bar where Chelsea Clinton was in attendance. I rooted for Obama (so did the blonde I was with). Sprouts betrayed, commence blooming. Little did I know that I just created a monster of a flower to be, to keep the bad metaphor going.
The next day, I felt a sense of intellectual guilt that quickly turned me into an NR-reading, AM-listening, loud mouthed Ricochet reader/listener to be.
May '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
I grew up in a conservative family, but since I was overseas most of my formative years, I never understood the political divide. However, during high school at a boarding school in the early-mid 80's, I lived in a very politically turbulent country. The communists (sponsored by Cuba and USSR) were trying their hardest to take over the Guatemalan government. It didn't take me too long to figure out how evil communism is, especially when I saw eviscerated dead bodies lying beside the highway, and burned out buses with murdered bus drivers beside them - at 13. Thank you, communist guerrilleros.
I remember getting into very heated arguments with one of my teachers at boarding school who had a romantic affinity with the notion of communism. His mantra was that communism could only really work in a closed system. I kept insisting that was absolute rubbish. Communism could only work if no humans were involved because humans intrinsically want freedom, not oppression.
It wasn't until I had finished college and started working in the corporate world that I dug in and researched U.S. politics. Oh, and Rush Limbaugh helped. I'm decidedly conservative now.
Sep '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
I was a hippie kid (actually we referred to ourselves as freaks) and took on all the default leftwing notions. I was a rebel without a clue. Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate, Ford. I actually visited Viet Nam in 1970 as a Merchant Mariner. I was all for civil rights too (still am, of course) but then feminism piggy backed on the civil rights movement and there were too many things they were asserting that didn't make sense to me.
The abortion debate had some effect on me too. I found myself coming to the conclusion that those who believed abortion was murder had a perfectly reasonable philosophic point regardless of all the other considerations and the lefts demonization of them was unfair. This tipped me off to how utterly craven they are. I just started seeing holes in their arguments and underhanded tactics used constantly by the left. Still, I wasn't political or very knowledgeable.
Then I lived in socialist Egypt for 12 months. In 1979. I had lots of time to read papers, the International Herald Tribune, and Middle Eastern English language papers.
(continued)
Nov '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
My earliest political memory was watching Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan go at it on TV. I was 10 in 1979. I became aware of politics during that time. I can't say that I knew much about politics, however.
Sep '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
At that time, the perspective in the USA was very sympathetic to Israel and I heard a great deal of the other side of the story from Egyptians and other Middle Easterners. I integrated their arguments and perspectives, but upon further study and understanding I came back to sympathy forthe Israeli side.
At the same time, I became aware of the madness of Socialism first hand, and I started to appreciate America and all the great things that I had taken for granted.
Getting all these different perspectives from people and the media, I became intensely aware of bias and propaganda. I also was beginning to process the profound differences religion and culture has in peoples perspectives. I began questioning and ultimately rejecting cultural relativism.
I went directly from living in downtown Cairo to study in pristine and organized Switzerland.
There I encountered the European perspective on America, which I gradually came to see as being basically uninformed leftist tripe. I started to defend America in discussions as well.
Back in America in the 80s I heard Rush Limbaugh, and for the first time I heard someone putting into words pretty much what I was thinking.
Nov '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
My first political memory was when I was seven, riding in the car with my parents and seeing a campaign billboard for Carter in 1980 at the corner of Thunderbird and 32nd Street in Phoenix, AZ. When I pointed it out to my folks, I recall my parents, who were by no means politically active, telling me how much they looked forward to voting for Reagan. I guess a Republican was born that day.
Following memories was watching Reagan's inauguration in Mrs. Pape's second grade class, and then watching coverage of Reagan's shooting in that same class. I wanted to write a book for my fellow 5th graders in response to the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing in 1983. And I debated my best friend, Jason Hunt, on the way to school every morning during the 84 campaign. Jason's dad was a union man from Chicago in a right-to-work state, and none to happy about that.
Later on, I wrote my Junior year research paper on Perestroika while home with Chicken Pox and seem to recall summarizing the paper that the communists would fall...by the year 2010. I guess I was right!
Jun '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
I didn't know it at the time, but the lever which set my awakening in motion was my first presidential election in 1996. I proudly voted for Bill Clinton because he loved black people, and gays, and loose women, and weed, and I was all cool with that stuff, too. Then I joined the Army three years later and shipped off to Basic Training, where I found out the Army was so broke that the training units weren't allocated blank ammunition or fuel, and my little tiny E1 check paid out about $700 a month after taxes. The caul, so to speak, was being lifted. Then I got stationed in Germany and met some real honest to goodness victims of Communism. That was it for me.
Sep '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
I was in the 4th grade in 1980, and I remember we had a school vote between Carter and Reagan. Reagan won in a landslide. Remarkable, I know, except that I grew up (and still live) in Dick Armey's old district. So I was conservative from a very young age. My parents weren't political active, but they did teach us conservative values. We learned that there was no free lunch and to provide for ourselves. My first job was paper route (remember those!) at the age of 14.
May '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
My dad was raised in DC where two of his closest boyhood friends reached the upper echelons in US intelligence. He was a Marine, Korean War vet, and his observations about what the Communists were up to always proved out. I volunteered to work as a gofer in my local Nixon headquarters as a 13 year old in the 68 campaign and was fascinated by our participation with people in the Gene McCarthy campaign in protesting a local rally by George Wallace.
I was hooked...the conservative thing was sealed when, as a worker for Nixon in 72, bags of feces and urine were thrown at our HQ in Madison Wisconsin when I was a college freshman there. The left has never been a mystery to me since...
Dec '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
Fall of 1994. I was 11. It was 6th grade Social Studies class with Mr. Schwerman. When asked by some dope sitting next to me "Mr. S, what's the difference between a conservative and a liberal?" the equally dopey Mr. S replied "Liberals are people who like change and progress...Conservatives like old ways of doing things."
My dad (an evangelical pastor from MN) had raised me watching The McLaughlin Group and reading the Wall Street Journal and loving The Gipper, so I don't know if it was the smug look on my teacher's face, or the fact that I knew instinctively that I actually LIKED and WANTED "old" people and ideas in my life (because I was a young, stupid, boy who only knew how to wear Umbros and eat Dunk-a-roos), but that day was the first in my official conservative career. Going on 17 years now. Loving every minute of it.
(Note: in 4th and 5th grade I went as Rush Limbaugh, with fake candy cigar and all, for Halloween at my public school..it drove my teachers crazy.)
Edited on Dec 16, 2010 at 10:25pmJun '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
Well, I was seven years old and home from school watching the Mickey Mouse Club when the broadcast was interrupted with a live broadcast from Dallas, Texas. They were marching Lee Harvey Oswald through the courthouse when a man (Jack Ruby) approached him and shot him in the stomach at point blank range. I ran into the kitchen to tell my mom what I had seen. But despite that didn't really begin to tune in until around 1966 when discussions around the dinner table started focusing on Vietnam. We watched Firing Line religiously. I was ten years old and I listened intently though was often 'shushed' by my older brothers. In 1968 we moved to the Bay Area and that's the year that essentially all hell broke loose, riots in Berkeley, Chicago at the Democrat Convention, assassinations of MLK and RFK, etc. I was in 7th grade and started to get very immersed in it. And it helped that my dad was a former naval attache to the American embassy in New Delhi, a philosophy grad, who had studied international politics on a Fulbright scholarship, and ardent conservative. Conversations around the table became more intense and multi-faceted.
May '10
Re: At What Age Did You Become Politically Aware?
Mmmm, it sounds like most of you became politically aware before I was born. I got started by reading the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal in high school (2006). Then I transitioned to reading Ayn Rand, but her philosophical non-fiction, not her fiction. Now look what happened.