How many people here on DU were once rethugs/conservatives? [View all]

[Hugabear]

Confession time: I once considered myself a rethug.

To use a popular phrase, it was a 'youthful indiscretion'. I was raised in a very conservative fundamentalist family. I was always taught that all one had to do was work hard, and they could have everything. Taxes, labor unions, environmentalism were all bad things, part of the Democratic communist plot. Somehow I managed to make it through 12 years of public education, but I must have been an exception.

So then I graduated from high school, and went off to college. And yes, at first I clung to my conservative views. You don't erase almost two decades of brainwashing overnight. But then a funny thing started happening. I found it increasingly difficult to defend my views on my own. Sure, I could listen to Rush Limbaugh and find out what the "right" answers were. But it didn't take long for me to see through that his BS, how so much of what he said was outright lies, and the rest was twisting information around to suit himself. I began to realize that much of what I believed in was wrong. As I heard others talk about their views, I noticed that I really couldn't argue with what they were saying.

Then I graduated from college, and found myself in the real world. I looked at the people around me, and saw that these were the people that the GOP tended to vilify - the poor, lower-middle class, minorities, even *gasp* - homosexuals. I saw them as regular people just like myself, while conservatives saw them as threats and leeches.

So there you have it - through education and experience, I underwent a metamorphosis from fundamentalist conservative to agnostic liberal.

No wonder rethugs are so afraid of education.