Political Maturity

As a fourth grade student, the local school district arranged for our Congressman to come and speak to my elementary school. The speech served as little more than a campaign stump for the two-term politician to appeal to local educators and administrators, as the average fourth grade cares  as much about politics as they do about school itself. However, the visit hit a nerve inside of me as I had spent much of the previous summer on the campaign trail with my parents working for his challenger. Not yet mature enough to process the nuances involved with politics, I simply associated the Congressman with a group of people my parents didn’t particularly care for and so this automatically qualified him as “evil” in my ten year old mind.

At that age, I viewed everything as a competition–Cowboys vs. Redskins, Americans vs. the Soviets, Reagan vs. communists and Republicans vs. Democrats. I divided the world in two halves, the good (Cowboys, Americans, Reagan and Republicans) and the bad (Redskins, Soviets, communists and Democrats). I saw the Congressman as an amalgamation of all that was evil and a threat to all I held as dear. I longed to see him lose, just as I longed to see Dexter Manley fail on the field.

I don’t remember much of his speech from that day, mainly because shortly after our principal introduced him, my principal and teacher escorted me out of the assembly. As the rest of the assembly rose to their feet to greet the Congressman with cheers and applause, I sat holding my ears and stomping my feet. Once the applause died down and the Congressman began his speech, I rose to my feet and attempted to lead the entire fourth grade in a chant of “Demo-crap! Demo-crap! Demo-crap!”

I managed to get a good laugh and even a couple of fellow students to join the chant before the cavalry arrived to whisk me away. I thought my parents would be impressed, but they weren’t. Though fiercely political, my parents opted to express their views with maturity, something I didn’t learn until after college. For the next fifteen years, I traveled from one political extreme to another, “plugging my ears and stomping my feet.”

In high school, I clung to “God and guns.” In college, I published left-wing underground newspapers and staged walk-outs protesting the invasion of Iraq.

In 1996, on my 18th birthday, I registered to vote and aligned myself with the Christian Coalition. By 2002, I had bypassed everything in between and became a leader in the local Green Party. However, in 2004, I backed off these radical beliefs just slightly to campaign for John Kerry, a candidate I viewed as “too conservative”, just because I feared the ramifications of a second Bush term. The night of the 2004 Presidential election, I stayed up to watch the returns and collapsed face first into my bed, tears streaming down my cheeks as George W. Bush was declared the winner.

That night took a lot out of me physically and emotionally, but it also marked the birth of a political maturity in my life. I began to judge politicians not by the “R” or “D” after their name, but by the substance of their policies. Slowly (ok, very slowly), I began to fight my way through the cloud of hot-button issues politicians surround themselves with and began digging for substance. While I had been politically active literally my entire life, my political diet had consisted of nothing but candy and soda pop and I knew I required something far more nourishing.

I began by canceling my subscriptions to Mother Jones and the National Review. Next, I stopped watching the cable news networks at night. Finally, last December, I gave up my final vice, the one I had struggled with the longest, political talk radio. Not only am I less angry, but I can also see things more clearly, and I am amazed at what I see.

I consider myself a “21st Century Digital Boy,” I Twitter, Facebook and blog on a daily basis. Probably 85% of the people I follow on Twitter are political in nature, a diverse group ranging from 70 year old Libertarians to 20 year old self-described Socialists and everything in between. The one thing they all share in common is that they remind me of my ten year old self, distracted by “the issues,” refusing to listen to the other side, choosing instead to scream, yell and throw temper-tantrums.

Those on the Left go on and on about Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

Those on the Right bitch incessantly about immigration, mosques and birth certificates.

Sadly, it’s representative of the personalities we have in Washington (and in my case, in Austin). Everyone screaming at the top of their lungs about issues, that in the grand scheme of things, matter very little. Meanwhile, due to this dissonance, they are unable to come together and engage in serious debate about issues that really do matter–the economy, jobs, and national security in the 21st Century,

At times it seems the only sane person left in the political universe is Joe Scarborough, who constantly reminds his followers to “keep calm and carry on.” We’d all benefit from Scarborough’s advice, because as someone who has walked  both sides of the road, I can assure you this is the only way to political maturity, and until we have a group of political mature politicians in Washington (and Austin), the country will only become more polarized as our problems intensify.