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Location: Home.
Listening: The West Wing (the lyric is from Sting's "Russians").

I've realized that, despite about ten years of believing otherwise, I'm just not suited for politics. At the age of 14, I fell in love with the political arena. My parents were rabidly conservative Republicans who relished ranting about current affairs over dinner. As a result, I knew much more about politics than any freshman in high school really should. I argued constantly with my teachers in history and with my fellow students in the cafeteria. By eleventh grade AP U.S. History, I had earned a dual reputation as the conservative watchdog of The Hutchison School and the girl who wrote a three-page essay condeming Abraham Lincoln for his hypocrisy in masking a simple exercise of federal war power as an abolitionist crusade--and managed to get a 5 on the national exam nonetheless. In essence, I was my own worst nightmare.

When I moved to Los Angeles at 17 for college, I was pro-life, pro-war and pro-anything else the Republican party told me to be. I left a pro-choice, pacifist Libertarian. The first step in what my parents see as my fall from grace was my thesis paper at the end of my junior year in high school. Our assignment was to select any event in history and present a 20-page minimum analysis of the event. I chose the incident at My Lai. My original thesis was that My Lai was a failure of personal integrity on the part of soldiers with criminal backgrounds and was in no way indicative of the government's intent or conduct during the war as a whole. While gathering statements from "the other side" to refute in my paper, I slowly began to realize that my thesis was shaky. On the last night before the paper was due, I changed my conclusion and stayed up all night rewriting my paper. I stunned my liberal history teacher and my fellow students by presenting a paper that condemned the United States government for the way it chose to wage war in Vietnam and arguing that the company at My Lai were innocent soldiers, frightened by their surroundings and pushed to the mass murder of civilians by a military that used psychological manpulation to characterize every Vietnamese citizen as the enemy. I realized, during that night, that it was more important to tell what I felt to be the truth than to hold a party line.

Over the four years that followed, I left many of my conservative sentiments behind as I met people from every imaginable background and ethnicity. I found it impossible to hold onto the conclusions I had been raised with as I made friends with individuals whose parents were drug dealers because they couldn't feed their families working a minimum wage job, who had been persecuted for their religious beliefs or race or sexual preference, who were themselves the children of illegal immigrants, educated people who worked as janitors at USC to make sure their children could attend college, something that they had no hope of doing in Mexico or Ecuador...I realized that I had only been hearing one side of so many stories. I couldn't, in good conscience, refuse to hear them.

But I digress. I realized just now, watching The West Wing, that I would be horribly ill-suited for formal politics. I am steadfast (read: stubborn), passionate (read: rabid), and, by and large, unwilling to compromise (read: bullheaded). Were I a press liaison, it would be incredibly difficult for me to get through one junket without an "Excuse me, but fuck you.". Were I a Congresswoman, there would be no offers on the table. Were I a candidate, there would be little debate. I cannot abide double-speak. I despise spin. I have no use for negative campaigning or for lying in the name of gleaning votes. I consider sensationalism to be insidious. I believe in telling the truth whenever possible, no matter what the outcome. I hate war. I don't believe that human life is worth oil or alliances or imperialism. I believe in personal accountability for one's decisions and I avoid hypocrisy whenever I can. John Calhoun and Thomas Jefferson are personal heroes because they wouldn't back down. Ted Kennedy is a murderer and Strom Thurmond is a racist whose presence cannot be tolerated. I wouldn't last six months.

That realization, in and of itself, is as sobering as the one I had in eleventh grade.