About
I’ve spent my life so far trying to understand human nature
I often identify with Commander Data of StarTrek’s “Next Generation” who, as an android, was built without emotions, or with the Vulcan Spock, from the original StarTrek series who finds human emotions “illogical.”
I understood as early as high school that literature was a primary route-of-entry into human nature. Thus, I studied British and American Literature in college, paired with a study of Economics. I grew up Navy, but between being oppositional by nature and my college’s ROTC program being Army, I very nearly ended up driving Apaches in the first Gulf War — stopped only by an eyesight-damaging injury.
While I toyed with vacating the Republican Party in high school, my first serious dalliance with the Democrats occurred during college. Mom chalked it up to “that liberal education”. I chalked it up to nausea growing out of Republican “values.” But for a long time, my political alignment was based more on what I was against, rather than what I stood FOR.
After a stint in the hotel business on completion of my undergraduate education, I hit the books again. At first, I pursued an MDiv, hoping to quench my argument with a large portion of my up-bringing. When Seminary merely confirmed my sense of what Fundamentalism was — and that the teeth-grinding nausea it induced would never go away, I switched tracks, bound for an MA in Psychology.
Jewish by birth and raised Fundamentalist, I now pursue what I call “Judeo-Christian Buddhism”. For years, I felt stymied in my pursuit of religion though — while I really wanted to understand religion, I never really connected. Now, I realize that I’m handicapped by high-functioning autism — at least in that it leaves me unable to *feel* religion. Religion needs to be ‘logical’ for me — I don’t have the luxury of emotion to mortar over the cracks like so many normal folks, and human failures seem to carry a much greater risk of pulling me away from particular religions. Knowing this, I’ve spent the time since I finished my Masters degrees rooting out the core values underlying my own “rules structure” and my arguments with Fundamentalist Christianity.
To my delight, I’ve learned that these align me with the Progressives. That’s been a major relief, since that alignment explains nearly all of what I’m about, including my opposition to Fundamentalism and its attempt to hijack America. I’m also increasingly convinced that the core values of the party are what we need to be preaching, not the policies.