The heartbreak of becoming a liberal in a conservative family

In 2010, I knelt down next to a relative as he held my laptop in his hands.

We had just spent 17 agonizing minutes watching WikiLeaks' Collateral Murder video, which contained footage of the 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which US troops killed at least a dozen civilians, including two Reuters journalists. , mocking as they opened fire.

Tears welled up in the corner of their eyes. The horror of watching US armed forces shoot innocent people, laughing even as they hurt children in the process, hit hard.

For many, the video on the collateral murder was a wake-up call. For others, like the person sitting next to me, it did the opposite.

"It's not real," they said.

The words hit me like a slap in the face.

"It can't be real. It's just that. .. i don't believe it."

I had put up the video in a last ditch effort to mend another relationship fractured by political differences. Rather than building a bridge, however, it highlighted the growing gap between my past and my present.

I grew up in rural Indiana in a bubble predominantly white conservative. I went to church three times a week and led prayer groups around my public school flagpole. I was desperately proud of my country, cheered when George W Bush won the 2000 election after "voting" for him in the fictitious college election, and fiercely argued his defense four years later when a classmate dared to criticize a sitting president.< /p>

In a high school surrounded by cows and cornfields, I found a belonging to my beliefs. That's what I knew - what my parents knew, what my friends knew, what my church knew - and nothing could convince me otherwise.

He took less to attend a private Christian university less than an hour to change everything. In first grade, I eagerly signed the school's "Community Life Agreement," pledging to abstain from all vices (sex, gambling, alcohol) until I graduated. I agreed to a campus-wide ban on R-rated movies and unchoreographed dances. I attended the obligatory chapel twice a week, went to a local church on Sundays, and instead of chafing in the sheltered environment, I thrived.

Everything should have stayed the same, and for countless students, it did. But after my first year, as my fellow students continued to find answers, I started to find questions.

I had a UK academic adviser teaching outside from the American perspective, and whose lectures challenged the brilliant American idealism that was so dear to me. I learned how the United States bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam War, dropping over 2.7 million tons of bombs on the country over an eight-year period, and I was shocked to learn that this paled in comparison to the Allies' 2 million tons of combined bombs. during World War II, even taking into account the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Then I learned of the My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers raped, tortured and killed hundreds of innocent Vietnamese while multiple orders to stop the killings were routinely ignored.

The more I learned, the more I realized that my Christian beliefs did not correspond with the so-called Christian nation in which I was brought up. The Bible told me to care for the sick, hungry, and poor, while my fellow Republicans raged against universal health care, food stamps, and claimed poverty was the result of laziness. As the veil lifted, I realized that American exceptionalism was not a divine duty to protect democracy around the world, but an illusion sold to the American people that fueled our military-industrial complex. And we had fallen in love with hook, line and sinker.

The more I tried to share what I had learned with my friends and family, the more they considered me a lost cause. My parents joked that I had "gone liberal" and couldn't wait until I left my conservative Christian college for things to go back to normal.