Any honest pastor would tell you that’s almost entirely what congregations are like.I live between two worlds. One is conservative, the other progressive. I continue to be astonished by the crazy things I hear people in each world saying about people in the other. They live side by side, citizens of the same nation. Yet they don't understand each other at all.
— Robert P. George🇻🇦🇺🇸🪕 (@McCormickProf) July 4, 2022
And then leave town, because such honesty will put you in a world of hurt.
If you want to relate it strictly to politics, I’ve been a radical progressive who’s lived all but 5 years of my life in Texas. I couldn’t live in two worlds because there was only my brother and the friends I grew up with to agree with me, and they all left the state and (almost all) didn’t look back. So you don’t know the meaning of the word “heartbreak,” buddy!* (I learned if I told people what I thought, they’d just think I didn’t mean it, because I couldn’t be one of “them.” Surely I was one of “us.”)
OTOH, the lesson is: ‘twas ever thus. I have a memory of Walt Kelly relating an anecdote from his early days, when his favored candidate had won the election. He and his friends were celebrating when they came across a disgruntled supporter of the losing party who told them just what she thought of them: “You bastards are bastards!”
When I was in high school, I had to hide my McGovern buttons from my father; at my mother’s warning. He would not have accepted that I had such ideas.
Yeah, it’s a wonder tall trees ain’t laying’ down, cause this old world keeps spinning’ ‘round, but: same as it ever was. Somehow we persist.
*Obscure Tom Waits reference.
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