I suppose it was a childhood spent in the south with very liberal, thoughtful parents.
One of the first things I learned, once I started attending school, was skepticism about crowds. Many of my classmates were from families where the “N word” was uttered as casually as “cat” or “dog.” Most had parents who were ardent supporters of Goldwater, then Nixon, then Reagan. Hippies were dirty commies, the Vietnam War a righteous cause, and Watergate the legal harassment of a great president. Grammar school history textbooks of Louisiana at that time taught students the Confederacy was grossly misunderstood by northerners who exaggerated the unfortunate-but-rare abuse of slaves. The Reconstruction era was depicted as a dark time when ignorant blacks and dishonest Yankee carpetbaggers were set loose on a helpless population.
By my teens, I’d figured out that moral and rational decisions were not best made by checking to see what most of the people around me thought.
This did not make me popular in certain online circles during the Satanic Panic, or in the months after the 2000 election, or in the wake of 9/11. It can cause me “problems” to this day.
Pam Troy 