Ten Years Later, I Don't Suck As Bad

A lot of bad things have happened since the sun came up on this day ten years ago. Many people have died: some tragically, some heroically, some justly. Innocent people have been caught in the crossfire of a war that began -- let us not forget -- when deranged fanatics attacked a civilian target in the most populous city in our country.

But good has also come of this horror. Saddam Hussein was removed from power in Iraq and replaced with a vastly improved government. Osama bin Laden was finally found and killed. Terrorists of various stripes have been destroyed or weakened by our resolve. And across this great nation, brave men and women -- Soldiers, firefighters, police, civilians, and officials -- have protected and inspired us with acts of courage and honor and sacrifice.

Oh, and another good thing that has come of this tragedy: I don't suck quite so hard anymore.

You see, I have a confession to make, and for those who haven't known me for very long this will come as a shock: I used to be a liberal. And I don't mean a mild, gentle, lukewarm liberal, like John McCain. I mean a rabid, screeching liberal. I made Keith Olbermann look like Charles Krauthammer. I was a member of the ACLU, Amnesty International, and MoveOn.org. I got Ralph Nader to come speak at my college during his 2004 campaign. I owned Fahrenheit 9/11 on DVD. I edited a student magazine with an anti-war theme so extreme a concerned father called the school and threatened to remove his son from the journalism department. I believed in freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the immediate closure of Guantanamo, and that Bush, Cheney, and Rove were the real "Axis of Evil." I believed our government was complicit in 9/11 and would not rule out the idea that Dubya and his cohorts orchestrated the entire thing as an excuse to go to war "for oil." I even went out in the middle of the night with stickers reading "FORTIFIED WITH 100% PURE IRAQI BLOOD" and stuck them on gas pumps around the city.

I was barely to the right of those people in black bandannas in Seattle who hurled Molotov cocktails at World Bank officials... and honestly if I could have afforded the plane ticket I probably would have been there and done that.

I would tell you the name of the anarchist website I got this from, but I don't believe in your rules.

I owned several books by the organization CrimeThinc., which encouraged armed resistance against our corporatist, fascistic, totalitarian police state, as well as dumpster diving, shoplifting, and forming anarchosyndicalist squat communities in abandoned buildings. I also evangelized, passing these books and ones containing similarly crazy ideas, such as Kalle Lasn's Culture Jam, on to my younger brothers. (God forgive me.)

The anti-war magazine I edited featured a giant full-color comic as the center spread, which I commissioned from a very talented artist on the newspaper staff. It was a parody of The Wizard of Oz called "The Wizard of Oil." Condi Rice was Dorothy, and Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were her companions. Other features in that issue included a "form letter" from Bush to the family of a slain soldier, featuring various misspellings and a childishly callous attitude. For example, "As a tokin of thanks for yer sacrafise, I have attached a 30% off coupon for Pizza hut." It also contained a handwritten note saying "Daddy, please corect my spelling." Yet another page contained a "lost recording" of Bush's secret tour in Vietnam, revealing why the government kept it a secret. (His ineptitude, of course. He said "clacks" instead of "clicks" and thought all the Viet Cong were actually named Charlie. Har har.)

Twenty pages of that. Seriously.

I argued about the war with everybody who would sit still long enough. I knew all the talking points, and I threw in lots of colorful little tidbits. "Halliburton got an illegal no-bid contract! Condi Rice had intel from the CIA in August showing a Bin Laden attack was imminent! Dubya's National Guard papers were doctored! The towers collapsed into their own footprints! Into their own footprints!" Etcetera.

Every year on 9/11's anniversary, my friends and I would have 9/11 parties. We would watch conspiracy theory videos and "jokingly" toast to jihad. In fact, some of my friends and family are having just such a party today. I no longer join them.

It's important that you know that on 9/11 I was as horrified as you were. I was curling my hair in my mom's house, getting ready for school, when she told me to come look at the news. I was standing in front of the TV, wondering if it was an accident or what, when the second plane hit the tower. At that moment, like everyone else in the world, I knew. It wasn't an accident. I drove to school in my mom's red Blazer with the radio on. I sat in the parking lot listening before I went in to my Logic class. Our professor didn't mention it until the end of the class, when he let us go early, saying it was surely hard for everyone to concentrate. I wandered through my home away from home, the theatre department. It was deserted except for the department head, an older man I much admired, sitting with his office door open and one cowboy boot propped on his desk, listening to the radio. We expressed our mutual bewilderment and then I wandered off again, towards the cafeteria, where students sat on chairs and tables and the floor staring up at the TV.

Later, at home, I remember very vividly sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table watching footage of people jumping from the buildings. I put my head in my arms and sobbed. One of my brothers, thirteen years old at the time, happened by and said, "Why is she crying?" My mom nodded at the TV and said, "Why do you think?"

Like many people who would later condemn the mindless, flag-waving patriotism of the coming few weeks, I was completely caught up in the mindless, flag-waving patriotism of the coming few weeks. I watched Congress gather on Capitol Hill and sing patriotic songs, and I cried. I watched an exhausted Giuliani deliver a press conference extolling the heroism of the FDNY, and I cried. I watched endless newsreel footage of brave first responders battling dust, debris, weariness, and sorrow, and I cried. I wanted whoever had done this found and shot and stabbed and hanged and resuscitated and stabbed some more. In other words, my reaction was normal, healthy, just, and human.

I don't remember when I went full-bore leftist and started with my conspiracies, Bush-bashing, pacifism, and "poor poor terrorists" rhetoric. I can't point to one event or piece of knowledge or conversation that started it. What I do know is that it was after the immediacy of the attack faded, when I stopped feeling that awful sadness for those tiny faceless people jumping to their deaths from the flames, because that's when I stopped feeling that the people who did that -- who did that -- could only be evil. I didn't believe in evil. I was rational. I was an agnostic, not some simple-minded Christian. I knew that good and bad were relative, and if we could only understand the motivations for the attack, we could amend our behaviors so we weren't hated anymore, stop being unjust to the poor Muslims, and then everything would be fine. My idea of how this would all happen was hazy, but I was pretty sure it involved the U.N.

Look at 'em go! I can feel the problem-solving.

When I started believing in God, everything changed.

It's only recently that I have begun to understand why we have a two- party system in our -- and most -- countries. It's because when you break it down, there are really two ways of looking at the world: with God or without God. Without God, everything is up to us humans. We are capable of paradise ourselves. We can solve any problem. We are the best that exists or ever will, and we are also the worst. "Evil" is a fairy tale word. There are no evildoers, only wounded souls who need understanding and hugs and Toms shoes.

With God, we see that humans are a creation, a creature, and flawed, and we will always be flawed. No amount of appeasement or reason or humanitarian aid will stop it. No amount of human will can put an end to evil. Only one Will can -- and will -- do that.

Like Whittaker Chambers said of Communism, the vision of the American left is "the vision of man without God." I know because I had the vision. In it, nothing is true, nothing is good, nothing is false, nothing is wrong. Everything is whatever we think it is, and the end result of that is chaos and what I would call today moral depravity.

When people like I was are accused of not loving America, I know now that this accusation is correct. I did not love America, and neither did the people I associated with. How could I love an idea like America, which is based in morality, based in Godliness? I denied that America was Christian while I denied that I was unpatriotic. I needed America to be without morals if I were to love it. I didn't love it. After my initial "irrational" feelings of solidarity with my fellow Americans subsided after 9/11, I believed we deserved to be attacked, that we should and would cease to exist as we were. We needed to be brought down because we were a disgusting empire only after money to line the pockets of rich white men in suits. We needed to be more like Europe. I declared myself, on the masthead of that awful magazine, a "Citizen of the World," and at the same time declared myself a patriot for defending the United States against people trying to tear her down from the inside via renditions and the PATRIOT Act.

G.K. Chesterton said, "A man who loves humanity and ignores patriotism is ignoring humanity... Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation." America deserves her due appreciation. I am happy, after those years wandering in the darkness of cynicism, ignorance, and the terribly "simple faith" (Chesterton again) of atheism, to duly appreciate her.

I remember being about seven years old at a school assembly, with my hand over my heart, looking at the flag while Lee Greenwood's "Proud to Be An American" played, and crying. This memory was embarrassing to me at 22. At 32, I am there again. I am seven years old, and I am glad to be seven, because Jesus tells me it's a good idea. "Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3)."

But not these children. These are bad children.

I am observing the tenth anniversary of 9/11 by reflecting on the tragedy and heroism that have resulted from that willfully terrible act. It is a reminder that evil exists, and that good exists, and that thanks to my faith, I know which one wins in the end. I am also celebrating the fact that I am a better person today than I was then. I am still desperately far from perfect, but I am both wiser and happier now than I was then. This has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with grace.
 
Today I am proud to be an American, proud to cry when I see pictures of George W. Bush hugging soldiers or veterans getting misty-eyed when they hear the national anthem. I have gone from a young woman who actually paid for actual print copies of "The Nation" to be delivered to her home, to the Kristen you know and (should probably) love today. So it's not too late for your left-wing nephew who thinks Obama isn't liberal enough.
 
If there was hope for me, there's hope for anybody.

Except for him. He's done.

Conservative Punk

I stumbled across a website that has me feeling delightfully heartened. It's called Conservative Punk. Before I write more about it I'm going to do a bit more research, but I just had to share this excellent 2003 interview with the late music icon Johnny Ramone, of legendary punk band The Ramones, in which he shares his conservative views and support for the military.

We need to spread these kinds of things around so that people who think rock and punk are only for left-wingers can understand that they are espousing the kind of conformity they claim to despise. If they won't listen when I say it, they will certainly listen to Johnny Ramone!

Coming Out

As I learned in Political Science 101, political socialization is a lifelong process. Thus, it is no surprise that it took me 30 years to become a conservative. I hesitate to even write that word, because I have been indoctrinated to believe that "conservative" is a dirty word, synonymous with cruel, lying, ignorant, bigoted, fanatical, brainwashed, and stupid. If it is difficult for those of the Millennial generation -- those born in the 80s through mid 90s -- to declare themselves, let alone become, conservative, it is far more difficult for Gen Xers. Our entire identity was rebellion against the establishment, to the point that even our jeans were not allowed to be clean or fit properly until we were well into our 20s. (Mine are still questionable.) This mindset of radical liberalism became so prevalent that it is now its own institution, with its own protocol and dogma.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Gen Xer, it was inevitable that I rebel against it.

What I have learned over time is that modern liberalism is sentimentalism without substance. It's all very fine and good to see someone in trouble -- say, an out-of-work single mother -- and want to help her. The difference between modern liberals and modern conservatives is that liberals want to hand her a chunk of other people's money, while conservatives would prefer that she be empowered to earn a chunk of money, and keep earning more chunks, and keep that money to spend as she sees fit, rather than having to give large chunks of it away to perpetuate an endless cycle of need.

The other -- probably more important -- difference is that modern conservatives feel it is necessary for the good of the single mother, and by extension society itself, to point out the mistakes (conservatives believe in mistakes) that led her to be in a position so desperate that she requests a chunk of money from the taxpayers in the first place. Among the mistakes conservatives would point out are a failure to follow the basic tenets of sexual morality (conservatives believe in morality) such as having sex with someone she was not married to. Children of single mothers are more likely to do poorly in school, have sex as teenagers, and become single mothers or absent fathers themselves. At some point someone's got to stop the cycle of terrible decision making by pointing out that some decisions are terrible. Liberals would rather we affirm the "valid choices" of promiscuity and irresponsibility and instead teach our first-graders how to apply condoms and choose the IUD that's right for them.

The great Catholic writer and philosopher Peter Kreeft points out that the reason why the God of the Old Testament is often seen as cruel when compared to Christ (usually by whiny atheists who don't believe in the Bible anyway) is because compassion without justice is mere sentiment, and God had to instill a sense of justice -- a sense of right and wrong (something else liberals don't believe in) -- in His people before they could understand real love, a love with muscle. Love without muscle becomes something puny, that thing the liberals call "tolerance." Tolerance implies putting up with something. It invokes images of nameless masses, not separate individuals. It is not the hearty Christian love the Greeks call agape, which is true charity, which is not only active, vivid, and honest, but gets things done. Agape requires accountability. A parent doesn't teach her child responsibility, doesn't in fact teach her child anything of use, by giving her whatever she wants no matter what. That is simply not love. It is easy, and it makes the child temporarily happy, but it is not love. Ultimately, it's not even a particularly nice thing to do.

This is why liberal attempts to recast Christ as a misty-eyed hippie are so ridiculous. Yes, Jesus rescued the woman about to be stoned for committing adultery, but He also told her, "Go, and sin no more." This incident, among hundreds of others, implies that Jesus believed there was such a thing as sin, which immediately takes Him out of the running for hippiedom in particular and modern liberalism in general... although it never fails to confuse me why people who don't believe in Jesus want Him on their side so badly. It also tells us, more specifically, that Jesus believed adultery was a sin -- a decidedly un-liberal point of view. If He were a liberal, He would have instead said, "Go, and do whatever you want with whoever you want. Here are some condoms and, just in case, the number to your local Planned Parenthood and Medicaid office."

If you are wondering how I went from being the far-left radical I was at 22 to the conservative Libertarian/Republican I am at 30, the answer is complex... unless of course I strip it down to first causes and just say: God did it. Because that is the truth. It is also exactly the kind of answer that drives liberals crazy. I know this because I was one, remember? That phrase -- "God did it" -- is where I probably would have stopped reading and started ranting about the irrationality of belief in an interventionist deity and quoting loudly from Beyond Good and Evil.

My conversion to conservatism began with my conversion to Catholicism, and my conversion to Catholicism began with my conversion to pro-life from a default pro-choice position that was part-and-parcel with my liberal mindset, although I had never honestly considered the issue seriously by itself. No, I don't think you necessarily have to be a conservative or a Christian to be pro-life, but I think if you are going to be intellectually honest, if you are going to follow the pro-life argument to its logical conclusion, you are going to end up somewhere around conservative Christian. Recognizing the sanctity of life is recognizing that there is God, whether you want to call It that or not, and recognizing the right to life is going to cause you to ask some serious questions of modern liberalism, such as: how can the party that proclaims itself the champion of the poor and defenseless condone the ultimate in might-makes-right thinking? How can the same jerk in your workplace with the skinny jeans and ironic beard who got all up in your face about the innocent children dying in Darfur calmly dismiss the innocent children dying in their mothers' wombs at the rate of 1.2 million per year in the U.S. alone?

It's because liberals, for all their posturing about compassion, hold a functionalist view of humanity. That's because they have replaced Christ with Darwin, and they believe the solution to poverty is to kill poor people. (See Planned Parenthood.) One thing is for sure: it works! Just like blowing up your house will rid you of your termite problem. This is as brilliant as advocating that we cut off our feet because our pants don't fit. Your pants exist for your legs, not the other way around. These are the same idiots who recommend we conquer child abuse by killing children before they leave the womb, while suggesting we don't care about child abuse because we encourage people not to kill their unborn children. Then when we suggest people not have sex unless they fully intend and expect to make and subsequently care for a baby, we are accused of being Puritanical tyrants.

Having developed a healthy distaste for nonsense, I can no longer call myself a liberal, and having decided that, my only recourse is conservatism, which looks better and better the more I learn, the more I experience, and the more I think of Barack Obama, a black man, giving a speech at a conference for Planned Parenthood, your friendly neighborhood genocide factory, which has killed more black people than the KKK could ever dream of, and which operates legally in thousands of low-income minority neighborhoods around the world. How could I not identify with the only political ideology in the U.S. that recognizes this and condemns it? How could I not be proud to identify with that ideology, in an age when it is terribly unpopular to condemn anything besides condemning things? (Intolerance is the only remaining sin, according to liberals.)

Admittedly, I still have a lot to learn and wrestle with where conservatism is concerned. I am still learning about so many issues: civil unions, states' rights, isolationism vs. interventionism, the free market, the Fed, etc. But like St. Anselm, I belive in order that I might understand. And I refer here to Christianity, because where conservatism departs from Christianity -- and I am beginning to see that it rarely does -- I shall happily depart from conservatism.

The really difficult part is just beginning. I have to "come out." I have to admit to my peers, the people with whom I have identified and fraternized my entire life, that I am not one of them in a very fundamental and important way. I have to tell them that I can no longer support Barack Obama, that I am no longer convinced Ann Coulter is the Antichrist, and that there really is a liberal bias in the media. I am going to lose friends -- dear ones. And I am going to be faced with questions I probably can't answer just yet. But this is a part of life, if you're living it right: standing up for what you believe in, even when it's very unpopular.

I must become and remain a conservative pro-life Christian who speaks her mind as nonchalantly and unapologetically as pro-choice liberal atheists speak theirs. This is not easy. It means being ready to defend my position almost constantly, which is both tiresome and daunting. But it is necessary. Pro-choice liberals don't get up in the morning knowing they're going to have an abortion debate with someone, because theirs is the default position, at least in my age group. But to be a defender of righteousness, you must be perpetually armed and ready for battle, because your foe never sleeps. He is everywhere. He is lurking on Facebook right now, poised to click on the link to this blog and say insulting things, knowing he will be backed up by many anonymous commenters.

But once the friendly fire stops and the smoke dies down, I will be stronger and wiser for this experience. I will know who my friends are, and at long last, they will know who I am. Eventually, everyone will get used to the fact that I can no longer hide my beliefs. I will feel better, and they will get over it.

Meeting new people will be a bit trickier. I don't fit the conservative Christian profile. I'm not married and I have no kids. I work in the music industry. When it comes to other Gen Xers, I've read the same books, spouted the same arguments, made the same Rush Limbaugh jokes. I listen to the same music, go to the same places, sound the same, eat and drink the same stuff, wear the same Converse sneakers. I even have a facial piercing and tattoos. (When I voted in the GOP primary recently, the elderly gentleman who checked me in said, "You know you're at the Republican polling location, right?") I don't look the part, and this isn't going to change. On the outside I look just like your average 30-year-old MSNBC-watching Palin-basher.

They will never see me coming.

This blog was cross-posted to Modern Conservative.