apolitical still? ---- Tuesday 27 July

Last night I was feeling a trifle under the weather, so I ended up spending the evening on the couch, crocheting while I watched the first night of the Democratic National Convention. I wouldn't generally regard this as the best way to educate myself (at least in an efficient and unbiased-- if such a thing exists-- manner) for the upcoming presidential election, but I was flipping channels and caught a blip of Al Gore cracking a joke. I was intrigued. So I left the TV on PBS and began to listen.

I found the whole thing a rather disturbing experience. Yesterday at lunch I was reading about vegetarianism (veganism, at that) and actually considering it as a sensible lifestyle. Not that I don't enjoy foods often considered "vegetarian", but trust me-- I relish my meat. And then last night there I was finding myself agreeing with the Democratic party-- with Bill Clinton------- I was raised (whether or not anyone intended this) to be so against these things that I never even considered them options. At all. It has always been a part of my worldview that the Republican party and its leaders stand in the right (no pun intended) on any issue. (Though it is a measure of how far I've already come that to admit that frightens me. A lot.) That vegetarians are tree-hugging liberals threatening to destroy some un-named but incalculably precious element of the American way of life-- which is, of course, The Right Way of Life. I was so indoctrinated into this ideology that, changed though I thought my worldview had become, my gut reaction to many of these terms and names-- "liberal", "Bill Clinton", "Democrat", "left-wing", etc.-- is still one of unthinking self-righteous disgust. I am disturbed by this. (And rightly so, I know many of you are thinking as you read this.)

The crisis I suddenly faced last night was not so much whether I would consider myself Democrat or Republican, but rather the unsettling feeling of having my more recent convictional tendencies conflict so strongly with "beliefs" so deeply laid they seem nearly instinctive. Caught in the middle.

But I also look back at the past few years and am astounded by what I have been living through. The first presidential election in which I could vote was 2000, Bush vs. Gore, and I chose to abstain from voting, still convinced then that Gore was a "complete scumbag" but at the same time not entirely sure I was willing to vote actively for George W. I was 21 years old, struggling against and through Southern Baptistdom and a fairly typical Oklahoma-Buckle-of-the-Bible-Belt upbringing. Less than a year later, during my final semester of undergrad, the Twin Towers fell and the world changed. The country changed. The first anniversary of 9/11 found me living in Egypt-- where I was still living when the war in Iraq began the following spring. A bus accident and resulting nasty injury moved me back to the U.S. only a few days after Bush declared an (overly optimistic) end to major military conflict, and after a few months I found an office job (which did not require my college degree) and joined the ranks of working-class Americans muddling through poor health care-- a service which I sorely needed as I continued to recover from my shoulder injury. Several months later I decided to return to school to pursue a career in physical therapy, greatly influenced by own various trials and successes in rehabilitation. And here I am, just now beginning to see how profoundly these past four years have affected me-- and hopefully changed me. My life does not run in the same temporal cycles as the national government, but listening to Gore, Carter, and the Clintons speak last night highlighted this past presidential term for me. The confusion I, like so many others, felt following the 9/11 attacks as the U.S. government began its "crusade" against terrorists and "evil-doers" and then a year or so later sallied forth with its policy of pre-emptive war. The unforgettable experience of being an American living in the Middle East, living with the constant questions from my Arab friends and with the possibility of evacuation looming every day. A loss of faith and a subsequent onslaught of questions I had never before been allowed to think or ask.

I don't have a resolution for this rather long post. Just a lot of questions. Thoughts. Things to continue pondering.