In the last six months, I have reacquainted myself with people who I knew twenty to thirty years ago and almost all of them are very conservative in politics and thought (whereas, if you haven’t read any of my blogs, I am a very rational liberal, who thrives on scientific knowledge and equality for all people). I am struck by this and has left me asking how did they become so conservative? Although my parents were very conservative in some ways, they were liberal in their politics. Likewise, I have always been a very liberal thinker (equality to all and help lift up those less fortunate). What is also striking is that I had always thought that these people to be of the same mindset, caring about the same traditionally liberal issues. With the technology that we have today, there is no shortage of off-the-cuff remarks, some of which I have been surprised to hear.

Maybe I am asking the wrong question here. Is it I who has changed? Most certainly I have shed the last vestiges of irrationality in the last ten years, to which they still cling. I had always thought of myself as a rational man of science, but maybe that wasn’t entirely true. There were a few things that opened my mind to recognize my own irrational thinking. One was the senseless suffering (even those that call themselves God’s children). A personal experience of senseless suffering had sent me on a new quest to reevaluate what I consider to be true. To my astonishment, I found that I was using the word “know” incorrectly for things that were hearsay from others that were unverified or for things that were, in reality, only beliefs. I noticed that others did this too and even used it to describe things that were proven by science to be untrue. I am much more careful in what I say as being fact or knowledge. This evaluation and my confronting nearing the age of fifty has caused me to change my point of view, to look at things with an objective eye. I am realizing that I don’t have time to waste on things that might be and are probably not. I have to focus on the here and now, not a future possible world. I have to focus on what has been proven rather than what might be. So it is probably I that has changed and not them.