Yours truly in High School NJROTC
I live in Sugar Land, Texas, in Tom DeLay's old district. I attended one of the highest ranked public High Schools in Texas, Clements High School. I was active in High School NJROTC, all 4 years. Although I was undiagnosed (and until 1994, undiagnosable), in hindsight NJROTC was a very Asperger's syndrome-friendly place for me to be back then. There were, I'd speculate, more than a few undiagnosed "Aspies" in my unit back then. We were a band of ROTC geek brothers (and and some sisters, too--at least these girls would talk to us). And (
sigh) I was an ignorant teen Republican. Child of the 80s, Reagan was this kindly, grandfatherly figure and I just didn't know any better.
But as I grew up and read more and looked at the world more, I realized that history and reality just didn't line up with GOP talking points. I read an AP History of the Vietnam War my junior year of High School and was shocked by the degree to which I'd been lied to about that war, the failure of our nation to live up to its professed ideals, etc. That was the first hard crack in the facade.
The next fissure was the fact that, although I was hawkish on Defense (Cold War, remember) and thought of myself (possibly incorrectly) as fiscally conservative, I was "socially liberal" and also the son of a science teacher and a de facto atheist (albeit a largely apathetic one)...by the time the 1992 RNC rolled around and there was Pat Buchanan declaring a Kultur Kampf from the Astrodome, I suddenly found myself, as an atheist, no longer welcome in the GOP. "Well f*ck me, I guess I'm a Democrat now", I recall saying at the time.
I can remember what flipped me from being an apathetic atheist indifferent to religion to being anti-theist was when I hit puberty and began to find out just how twisted and anti-sex and anti-human conservative Christian sexual morality really was. It was infuriating. I remember an anti-abortion petition being circulated in my High School that I pointedly and publicly refused to sign.
I am to this day still an "out" atheist, insofar as I won't deny it if directly asked. But I don't go out of my way to advertise it either. I do have pro-atheist, pro-humanist shirts, but they're oblique and indirect, written in code. I do have some low key DNC shirts, too...nothing with the Donkey logo but just the encircled "D" that's less well known outside our own circles. I also bought some of those DNC shirts with a single word on the front, like "Hope" and "Promise", with eloquent quotations from RFK or Barbara Jordan on the back and www.democrats.org in tiny tiny letters under that.
I did once wear a Democratic Party baseball cap with the Donkey logo and got a "one finger salute" from a woman in an SUV turning into my neighborhood from Eldridge Road who saw it. I put peace stickers on my car when the war started in Afghanistan, and later put Kerry/Edwards stickers on my car and refused to take them off until Kerry ceased the recount. My car got "egged" on both occasions. No big deal, just annoying.
My parents are both retired school teachers and liberals and though they're "registered Republicans", they vote Democratic in the general election. They only strategically vote in the local Republican primary to try and make the local GOP slightly less bad. My dad is probably a "closet" atheist; he certainly never attended church with mom & me or had any interest in religion. It was from him that I learned the scientific method early on as a wee lad. We watched the original COSMOS together on PBS, taping every episode.
See, as an adult with Asperger's syndrome, for all the success I've had in Higher Education (I have 2 Masters degrees), I've had a much rougher time of it in the working world. I tried teaching High School German for a year and positively hated it. I had the most success working for a branch of AIG, Inc. from the late 1990s through about 2007, off and on. I loved it there, but the pay was originally less than my teacher's salary had been, and my mother constantly harangued me that I was "too smart" to keep working there, needed to do something better, etc. So I decided that if I became a librarian like her (she was by this time a certified school librarian herself, promoted up from classroom teacher), she'd finally have to shut up about my career choices.
While I found some success in Library School, earning my MLS in late 2004, it has been tough making it in the Library field. Geee, an undiagnosed Asperger's man trying to make it in a profession dominated by Neurotypical (NT), often catty women? What could possibly go wrong? irony
To make a long story short, after a few abortive, failed Librarian gigs later, today I am employed in a full time capacity for a library system, BUT, I am an hourly employee, not a salaried professional. I'm vastly over-qualified and under-paid for my present position. All of which adds up to the fact that out of economic necessity I have to live with my parents in the old neighborhood in Sugar Land.
We have reached an understanding that although I am a flaming lefty and an outspoken atheist and secular humanist, in Sugar Land proper I keep that stuff on the D.L. Not for my own sake but for the sake of my parents with whom I live. To avoid any potential "blowback" on them from our Republican friends & neighbors. It's sad but that's just how it is. If it were just me in this house, they could all kiss my @ss and I'd be as obnoxiously political as I want. But it's not just me, and so I have to tone it down a bit. Keep it low key, etc. I'll wear DNC shirts, but only low profile ones. I'll wear shirts that promote secular humanist values but eschew explicitly religion-bashing ones. On my own when I lived alone in Denton, Texas, I wore a scarlet red t-shirt emblazoned in Olde English lettering "Atheist"; I still have the shirt but don't wear it around here, for example. Around here I wear an "Atheist" shirt written in Greek...(if you sound it out, i.e. know how to pronounce Greek lettering, it reads "Atheos")...most people around here just assume it's a fraternity shirt or a "joke" fraternity shirt. I also sometimes wear a shirt with an Emma Goldman quote: "The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought", along with a small portrait of "Red Emma" herself alongside it.
Anyway, these are examples of how I remain true to my identity but keep it low key but not invisible. Perhaps I'm immature & childish at 44 to still be wearing t-shirts with slogans of any kind. Guilty as charged, I guess. One of the hallmarks of Adult Asperger's syndrome is emotional immaturity. We tend to be something like mentally 2/3rds our chronological age in terms of emotional maturity. Hell, I still feel like a 19 year old in my own head. I just "pretend" to be a grown-up, and frankly it can be exhausting.
I used to be a lot more political on Facebook but have become more circumspect, but there are times where I can't NOT call bullsh*t on people. I also sometimes post political things to Twitter. I've had to unfriend libertarian friends who would dog every vaguely lefty-political posting I would make and it annoyed the sh*t out of me. I was unconvinced by their arguments, but knew they'd be unconvinced by my carefully researched & wordy rebuttals even if I took the time to refute them point by point.
Mostly I just sit and listen, with my iPhone earbuds in, to my subversively Lefty political podcasts like Daily Kos Radio, Netroots Radio, Best of the Left, Majority Report, This Week in Blackness, and The Professional Left with Driftglass and BlueGal while I do my daily grind in the bowels of the library, or enjoying a Saturday lunch out on the town and sampling a few adult beverages. It helps keep me sane & grounded.
I don't know how often I'll be updating this Daily Kos Diary going forward, but after meeting some local Kossaks, I felt inspired to at least start one. Hell, it might prove cathartic and something of an emotional release...a space to express myself more fully than I allow myself on Facebook and other fora.