I grew up in a very conservative town. The one caviat is that it was in Long Island. Things have always been different here in terms of race, acceptability and the like.
The people I grew up with were educated. They were practical. We grew up in a world where color was never something unusual. I grew up with kids of every nationality, race, religion and belief system. There was no excuse here for ignorant naiveté.
Some of us were religious, but others were not. We were Baptist, Jewish, Congregational, Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, and every possible variation therein.
As kids, there was never any talk of race. In my town, is was more a case of rich and poor but, then again, only the cruelest of our generation - a very small percentage - curried leverage out of that. Others just remained deliberately disengaged.
In that respect, there were lots of kids like a young Mitt Romney - kids who grew up summering in Cape Cod, going to Europe for vacations before it was affordable, and expecting trust funds to kick in at age 30.
Kids who never knew that the world didn't live like them and never had the curiosity to understand why.
These are the people, more than any other, that I shake my head in disbelief at as I grow older and watch them dig in to their conservative roots.
These are the people who consider themselves socially liberal but fiscally conservative. Personally, they see little relevance in putting other classes down, either deliberately or passive-aggressively, in regular conversation. It's just not relevant to them.
But what's not encouraging is how they justify their fiscally conservative support of the republican party and find themselves agreeing with people who, in short, would prefer the country put blacks in their place, place gays in jail, and wish the poor would just go the fuck away.
Conservatives are not average Americans in 2012. Conservatives are on the wrong side of history once again. I wish more of them could see clear enough to understand that.
Many of them will, someday, consider gays equal to themselves in every way - but not today.
Many of them will understand that poverty isn't as simple as Darwinism and those there or heading can benefit from a helping hand - but not today.
Many of them will acknowledge down the road that Wall Street squandered our lives for their own greed - but by the time they do they'll be long since retired, with 24 hour care that most of us won't be able to afford and the luxury of dying in their own home and not some decrepit nursing home after they've long since gone on Medicaid.
In simple terms, their short-sightedness in understanding what's right in society won't occur when we could best benefit from it, but will be part of a conversation long after all of these things have been accepted as fact. Long after the people suffering most from this are either past it or dead.
And some will never understand that their world-view is a selfish one. They'll never have to. As I was once told, once you step inside the limo you never step out.
Ignorance in 2012 is more destructive than it was 10 years ago. Ignorance about the world around us, particularly from those who've got the world in their hands, is devastating.
It's too bad they'll never see the harm they cause until it's clarified for them in a book or movie or some other media variation many years after it would have been meaningful.