An Ideological Odyssey
We go through, usually during our teenage years, an awakening. Politics coerces itself into our lives. For most of the world, the voting age is 18. Long before this age, we are usually inundated with the convictions of others — usually parents, teachers, mass media, or other authority figures and institutions. My own father sat at his kitchen table every morning at six years-old reading the Chicago Tribune about Lyndon Johnson, Civil Rights, and Vietnam. He vividly remembers Watergate. So, is this inundation a net positive or negative for the youth? The truth, like in most cases, lies somewhere in the gap. There’s a clear line between indoctrination and influence, yet the balance tends to lean closer and closer towards the former, rather than the latter.
My ideological odyssey began in high school. I admired Barack Obama simply because he was a trail blazer, without any consideration of policy, establishment ties, or knowledge of the political class. I was acutely aware that my mother was a Republican and my father, a Democrat. I soon embraced the GOP, because Democrats wanted open borders. They wanted to kill babies. We were the greatest nation on the planet, and Democrats wanted us to be weak. They were atheistic, and anti-American. We all witnessed on television throughout the mid-to-late 2010s, riots and fires scorching in cities across the country because of rampant police brutality, among other…
