From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Fri Aug 10 2001 - 00:51:01 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> I have one big advantage in these discussions, at least in terms of tolerance, that goes
> back to a day when I was twelve years old. I moved to a new junior high school, and one
> day at lunch witnessed this certain kid arguing with four other kids at the same time...,
> and wiping them out! Next to him, they sounded like children.
>
> It was 1960, and this boy was for Kennedy, "the lesser of two evils", as he explained. I
> started to debate with him, and almost immediately he lost interest in what the other kids
> were saying, and they wandered away. He was the complete agnostic liberal, and I, the
> complete Christian conservative. But what I am most proud of was that we each almost
> *instantaneously* perceived that the other was neither stupid, nor ignorant, nor evil.
> Our arguments went on for five years, almost until the very last year of high school.
Don't you love that? I had a best friend very much like this.
He talked me out of being religious when I was 14 and I talked
him out of being pro-Vietnam and playing wargames by mail and
wire with people in the Pentagon when he was 17. We taught each
other debating and thinking skills and how to play chess. In
our junior year we did a joint project for humanities class. We
dug up all the apologetics and arguments for God and demolished
them one by one. As this was the heart of the Bible Belt we
then spend twice as long dealing with the objections of our
classmates and teacher.
>
> >From the very first sentences, our debates never descended to name-calling or real anger.
> There was exasperation, "how could you *possibly* believe that?", and even sarcasm. But
> the tone was always civil. One thing that emerged after a few months was that we were
> each being prepped nightly by our fathers, who were committed ideologues. But we were
> quite proud of the fact that because our fathers each was extremely excitable, emotional,
> and intolerant, we were able to rationally discuss the issues in ways that we knew that
> they would were incapable of.
>
Both of us were very different from our parents by the time we
met at age 13 or so. Except he had the advantage of growing up
in a home where "intellectual" was not considering an insulting
term.
Steve, Eve and I were the three outsider brains of our
highschool. We had taken all the interesting courses too early
and our parents for some stupid reason didn't want to send us to
college when we were 16, so the three of us got put in "special
study" classes where we basically spent a lot of time sharing
ideas and interests and having long deep discussions. Steve and
I were both math people so before we ran out of course to take
we would rack up the most math honors relative to each other.
But that didn't last long. He was a far better and more ardent
student than I but I had a more deft and intuitive grasp of the
material.
> We became each other's model of what a pretty-far-left liberal or a pretty-far-right
> conservative should be like. In later years, I'd notice some inconsistency in what some
> leftists were doing or saying, such as those who demanded amnesty after committing a
> civil-rights type law violation, and say to myself, "What? Not even Davis would say
> that!".
Steve was the white-socks, conservative hyper-rational
power-geek long before anyone got any points for that. I was
the wild-eyed theorist, poet and mystically leaning
proto-hippie. But we learned to hear each other out and we
learned to respect each other's views, intelligence and
sincerity.
>
> Far from seeing each other as mean-spirited or stupid, instead---because of the obvious
> symmetries of our positions---there arose the amazing platonic vision of the political
> spectrum. We knew of famous people to the left of him and to the right of me. There was
> obviously a deep difference in values or visions, but we never lost faith that we could
> eventually get somewhere in our discussions. Sometimes we did.
>
> I'm glad our debates finally ended. I'd probably still be a Christian if they hadn't.
Ours didn't end until we had switched positions with one another
on almost everything. :)
- samantha
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