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The Oregon Herald is a non-commercial, non-profit, ad free news publication.
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One Radical Opinion by "Radical" Russ Belville |
"Radical" Russ Belville was born on the first day of the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War in the town of Nampa in the "red" state of Idaho, where any opinion to the left of Reagan gets you labeled as "radical". He currently resides in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon (a.k.a. "Little Beirut") where he works in Information Technology. In his spare time, he enjoys writing about current events, playing the six-string bass guitar, and volunteering for liberal political causes. You can contact him via e-mail at letters 'at' radicalruss.net. |
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| Home | How Did I Become "Radical"? | | Next> |
| When I was fresh out of high school, I was a Reagan Republican.
I voted for Bush Sr. in my first presidential election. I believed the homeless
people should just go out and get jobs, drug addicts should "just say
no", and gay people were choosing that lifestyle. I believed that giving
rich people lots of money would "trickle down" to the masses,
the media had a liberal bias, and the terrorists hated us because they are
jealous. I believed affirmative action was reverse racism, the Mexicans
were trying to cross the border to take our jobs, and women had abortions
because they were too irresponsible to take care of their birth control.
So what happened? College. In particular, I think about two classes I took: Intro to Social Work and Macroeconomics. In my social work class, one exercise was a case study of a poor, single, dropout welfare mom with three kids. The professor had us read her story and come up with a way to get her out of poverty. Try as I might, I could not do it. She could only qualify for the basest of jobs at minimum wage. To work meant day care costs that exceeded the wages she earned. She could not afford any sort of schools or job training. Every avenue for advancement I could conceive of was impossible. At that moment, I realized, "hey, maybe those homeless guys can't just go out and get a job..." The macroeconomics class helped to show me how markets and money work. I learned about supply and demand; that no matter how much supply you have, it is worthless without the demand for it. I started to think, "hmm, what would be better for the economy: giving a rich guy more money when he's already hoarding his wealth, or giving poor people more money who will immediately spend it on debt and create demand for goods?" During college, I started to meet people unlike me. I met a gay person and asked him if being gay was a choice or a condition of birth. He answered, "Oh it's a choice, absolutely! I wasn't getting beat up enough in high school." I met a Mexican-American who was the first of his migrant-worker family to go to college. He told me he completely agreed with my views on closing down the border, because he wanted to spend weekends visiting onion fields to watch white people put in a fourteen-hour day stooped over in the hot sun for less than minimum wage. So now when I listen to conservatives, I think back to the ignorant high school kid I was, growing up in lily-white middle-class suburbia, blithely unaware of the reality of the world, and I wonder just how much these right-wingers are paying attention to the people and the world around them. Because from my point of view, being conservative means seeing the world in first-person singular, but being a liberal means seeing the world in first-person plural. |