Rebuilding Rob

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The rebirth of a former Reagan Era Warhawk

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As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today.

What have you changed your mind on?

This is a tough question. Obviously, there are things that I’ve changed about over the course of my life. I think that perhaps the greatest changes I’ve made – and granted this is one that I made from being a young kid to becoming an adolescent – is the tectonic shift in my political views for once being in conservative Reagan era Warhawk, into an progressive, bleeding-heart liberal.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I was very much a child of the 80s. Born in 1974 I very grew up and came of age during that decade that followed the 1970s. As a kid one of my favorite toy / comic book / cartoon lines was GI Joe. At the time, I like them because they were action, packed, colorful characters who played out the “never-ending struggle of good versus evil”

At the same time, the characters waved American flags and extolled the virtues of American values. We tried looking for things like that in the real world, a lot of Americans thought they found that in Ronald Reagan. Of course, these are the same people who didn’t realize that “Born in the USA” was never a song about patriotism, but rather a song about disillusionment of American values.

That’s something happened as I got into my teenage years. Like everything else in the world, I started to look at things differently. I’m sure a lot of it had to do with the fact that we were watching “operation Desert Storm“ unfold live on our TVs. War became a very real thing. All of a sudden, GI Joe wasn’t such a great adventure anymore.

At the same time, I started learning more about empathy. I looked around at the world and realized that not everybody grew up like me. Not everybody thinks, and act the way that I was raised to think and act. Even more importantly than that, it was differences didn’t make other people wrong in me right. It just made us… Different from each other. I realized that we can all learn things from one another. Around that time, it would occur to me that I could take some of those best values, best of virtues, the best things I see from other people and help them to make me into a better person.

It’s not that I don’t love my country. It’s that I’ve learned that my country, my culture, doesn’t always necessarily have all the right answers. I think that this was just the perfect storm in my life: I was entering adolescence and young adulthood. I was growing out of certain toys and ideals from my childhood as well.

So if you ask me something I’ve changed my mind about, I would tell you that I’ve made a tectonic shift in my political views from where I once was as a child. Maybe it’s not fair to attach political views to a kid, but this was something where I definitely broke away from things that my parents and the people around me were teaching.

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The article: “the rebirth of a former Reagan Era Warhawk“ first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.

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